________________________________________________
_ Where it was that Marius went will be disclosed a little further on.
Marius was absent for three days, then he returned to Paris,
went straight to the library of the law-school and asked for the
files of the Moniteur.
He read the Moniteur, he read all the histories of the Republic
and the Empire, the Memorial de Sainte-Helene, all the memoirs,
all the newspapers, the bulletins, the proclamations; he devoured
everything. The first time that he came across his father's name
in the bulletins of the grand army, he had a fever for a week.
He went to see the generals under whom Georges Pontmercy had served,
among others, Comte H. Church-warden Mabeuf, whom he went to see again,
told him about the life at Vernon, the colonel's retreat, his flowers,
his solitude. Marius came to a full knowledge of that rare, sweet,
and sublime man, that species of lion-lamb who had been his father.
In the meanwhile, occupied as he was with this study which absorbed
all his moments as well as his thoughts, he hardly saw the Gillenormands
at all. He made his appearance at meals; then they searched for him,
and he was not to be found. Father Gillenormand smiled. "Bah! bah!
He is just of the age for the girls!" Sometimes the old man added:
"The deuce! I thought it was only an affair of gallantry, It seems
that it is an affair of passion!"
It was a passion, in fact. Marius was on the high road to adoring
his father.
At the same time, his ideas underwent an extraordinary change.
The phases of this change were numerous and successive. As this is
the history of many minds of our day, we think it will prove useful
to follow these phases step by step and to indicate them all.
That history upon which he had just cast his eyes appalled him.
The first effect was to dazzle him.
Up to that time, the Republic, the Empire, had been to him only
monstrous words. The Republic, a guillotine in the twilight;
the Empire, a sword in the night. He had just taken a look at it,
and where he had expected to find only a chaos of shadows, he had beheld,
with a sort of unprecedented surprise, mingled with fear and joy,
stars sparkling, Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre,
Camille, Desmoulins, Danton, and a sun arise, Napoleon. He did not
know where he stood. He recoiled, blinded by the brilliant lights.
Little by little, when his astonishment had passed off,
he grew accustomed to this radiance, he contemplated these deeds
without dizziness, he examined these personages without terror;
the Revolution and the Empire presented themselves luminously,
in perspective, before his mind's eye; he beheld each of these
groups of events and of men summed up in two tremendous facts:
the Republic in the sovereignty of civil right restored to the masses,
the Empire in the sovereignty of the French idea imposed on Europe;
he beheld the grand figure of the people emerge from the Revolution,
and the grand figure of France spring forth from the Empire.
He asserted in his conscience, that all this had been good.
What his dazzled state neglected in this, his first far too
synthetic estimation, we do not think it necessary to point out here.
It is the state of a mind on the march that we are recording.
Progress is not accomplished in one stage. That stated, once for all,
in connection with what precedes as well as with what is to follow,
we continue.
He then perceived that, up to that moment, he had comprehended his
country no more than he had comprehended his father. He had not
known either the one or the other, and a sort of voluntary night
had obscured his eyes. Now he saw, and on the one hand he admired,
while on the other he adored.
He was filled with regret and remorse, and he reflected in despair
that all he had in his soul could now be said only to the tomb.
Oh! if his father had still been in existence, if he had still
had him, if God, in his compassion and his goodness, had permitted
his father to be still among the living, how he would have run,
how he would have precipitated himself, how he would have cried
to his father: "Father! Here I am! It is I! I have the same heart
as thou! I am thy son!" How he would have embraced that white head,
bathed his hair in tears, gazed upon his scar, pressed his hands,
adored his garment, kissed his feet! Oh! Why had his father died
so early, before his time, before the justice, the love of his
son had come to him? Marius had a continual sob in his heart,
which said to him every moment: "Alas!" At the same time,
he became more truly serious, more truly grave, more sure of his
thought and his faith. At each instant, gleams of the true came
to complete his reason. An inward growth seemed to be in progress
within him. He was conscious of a sort of natural enlargement,
which gave him two things that were new to him--his father and
his country.
As everything opens when one has a key, so he explained to himself
that which he had hated, he penetrated that which he had abhorred;
henceforth he plainly perceived the providential, divine and human
sense of the great things which he had been taught to detest,
and of the great men whom he had been instructed to curse. When he
reflected on his former opinions, which were but those of yesterday,
and which, nevertheless, seemed to him already so very ancient,
he grew indignant, yet he smiled.
From the rehabilitation of his father, he naturally passed
to the rehabilitation of Napoleon.
But the latter, we will confess, was not effected without labor.
From his infancy, he had been imbued with the judgments of the party
of 1814, on Bonaparte. Now, all the prejudices of the Restoration,
all its interests, all its instincts tended to disfigure Napoleon.
It execrated him even more than it did Robespierre. It had very
cleverly turned to sufficiently good account the fatigue of the nation,
and the hatred of mothers. Bonaparte had become an almost
fabulous monster, and in order to paint him to the imagination
of the people, which, as we lately pointed out, resembles the
imagination of children, the party of 1814 made him appear under
all sorts of terrifying masks in succession, from that which is
terrible though it remains grandiose to that which is terrible and
becomes grotesque, from Tiberius to the bugaboo. Thus, in speaking
of Bonaparte, one was free to sob or to puff up with laughter,
provided that hatred lay at the bottom. Marius had never entertained--
about that man, as he was called--any other ideas in his mind.
They had combined with the tenacity which existed in his nature.
There was in him a headstrong little man who hated Napoleon.
On reading history, on studying him, especially in the documents
and materials for history, the veil which concealed Napoleon
from the eyes of Marius was gradually rent. He caught a glimpse
of something immense, and he suspected that he had been deceived up
to that moment, on the score of Bonaparte as about all the rest;
each day he saw more distinctly; and he set about mounting, slowly,
step by step, almost regretfully in the beginning, then with
intoxication and as though attracted by an irresistible fascination,
first the sombre steps, then the vaguely illuminated steps,
at last the luminous and splendid steps of enthusiasm.
One night, he was alone in his little chamber near the roof.
His candle was burning; he was reading, with his elbows resting on
his table close to the open window. All sorts of reveries reached
him from space, and mingled with his thoughts. What a spectacle is
the night! One hears dull sounds, without knowing whence they proceed;
one beholds Jupiter, which is twelve hundred times larger than the earth,
glowing like a firebrand, the azure is black, the stars shine;
it is formidable.
He was perusing the bulletins of the grand army, those heroic
strophes penned on the field of battle; there, at intervals,
he beheld his father's name, always the name of the Emperor;
the whole of that great Empire presented itself to him; he felt
a flood swelling and rising within him; it seemed to him at moments
that his father passed close to him like a breath, and whispered
in his ear; he gradually got into a singular state; he thought that he
heard drums, cannon, trumpets, the measured tread of battalions,
the dull and distant gallop of the cavalry; from time to time,
his eyes were raised heavenward, and gazed upon the colossal
constellations as they gleamed in the measureless depths of space,
then they fell upon his book once more, and there they beheld other
colossal things moving confusedly. His heart contracted within him.
He was in a transport, trembling, panting. All at once, without
himself knowing what was in him, and what impulse he was obeying,
he sprang to his feet, stretched both arms out of the window,
gazed intently into the gloom, the silence, the infinite darkness,
the eternal immensity, and exclaimed: "Long live the Emperor!"
From that moment forth, all was over; the Ogre of Corsica,--
the usurper,--the tyrant,--the monster who was the lover of his
own sisters,--the actor who took lessons of Talma,--the poisoner
of Jaffa,--the tiger,--Buonaparte,--all this vanished, and gave
place in his mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone,
at an inaccessible height, the pale marble phantom of Caesar.
The Emperor had been for his father only the well-beloved captain whom
one admires, for whom one sacrifices one's self; he was something more
to Marius. He was the predestined constructor of the French group,
succeeding the Roman group in the domination of the universe.
He was a prodigious architect, of a destruction, the continuer
of Charlemagne, of Louis XI., of Henry IV., of Richelieu, of Louis
XIV., and of the Committee of Public Safety, having his spots,
no doubt, his faults, his crimes even, being a man, that is to say;
but august in his faults, brilliant in his spots, powerful in
his crime.
He was the predestined man, who had forced all nations to say:
"The great nation!" He was better than that, he was the very
incarnation of France, conquering Europe by the sword which
he grasped, and the world by the light which he shed. Marius saw
in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre which will always rise upon
the frontier, and which will guard the future. Despot but dictator;
a despot resulting from a republic and summing up a revolution.
Napoleon became for him the man-people as Jesus Christ is the man-God.
It will be perceived, that like all new converts to a religion,
his conversion intoxicated him, he hurled himself headlong into
adhesion and he went too far. His nature was so constructed;
once on the downward slope, it was almost impossible for him
to put on the drag. Fanaticism for the sword took possession
of him, and complicated in his mind his enthusiasm for the idea.
He did not perceive that, along with genius, and pell-mell, he
was admitting force, that is to say, that he was installing in two
compartments of his idolatry, on the one hand that which is divine,
on the other that which is brutal. In many respects, he had set
about deceiving himself otherwise. He admitted everything.
There is a way of encountering error while on one's way to the truth.
He had a violent sort of good faith which took everything in the lump.
In the new path which he had entered on, in judging the mistakes
of the old regime, as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected
the attenuating circumstances.
At all events, a tremendous step had been taken. Where he had formerly
beheld the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France.
His orientation had changed. What had been his East became the West.
He had turned squarely round.
All these revolutions were accomplished within him, without his
family obtaining an inkling of the case.
When, during this mysterious labor, he had entirely shed his old Bourbon
and ultra skin, when he had cast off the aristocrat, the Jacobite
and the Royalist, when he had become thoroughly a revolutionist,
profoundly democratic and republican, he went to an engraver on the
Quai des Orfevres and ordered a hundred cards bearing this name:
Le Baron Marius Pontmercy.
This was only the strictly logical consequence of the change which
had taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated
round his father.
Only, as he did not know any one and could not sow his cards
with any porter, he put them in his pocket.
By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer
to his father, to the latter's memory, and to the things for which
the colonel had fought five and twenty years before, he receded
from his grandfather. We have long ago said, that M. Gillenormand's
temper did not please him. There already existed between them all
the dissonances of the grave young man and the frivolous old man.
The gayety of Geronte shocks and exasperates the melancholy
of Werther. So long as the same political opinions and the same
ideas had been common to them both, Marius had met M. Gillenormand
there as on a bridge. When the bridge fell, an abyss was formed.
And then, over and above all, Marius experienced unutterable
impulses to revolt, when he reflected that it was M. Gillenormand
who had, from stupid motives, torn him ruthlessly from the colonel,
thus depriving the father of the child, and the child of the father.
By dint of pity for his father, Marius had nearly arrived at aversion
for his grandfather.
Nothing of this sort, however, was betrayed on the exterior,
as we have already said. Only he grew colder and colder;
laconic at meals, and rare in the house. When his aunt scolded him
for it, he was very gentle and alleged his studies, his lectures,
the examinations, etc., as a pretext. His grandfather never departed
from his infallible diagnosis: "In love! I know all about it."
From time to time Marius absented himself.
"Where is it that he goes off like this?" said his aunt.
On one of these trips, which were always very brief,
he went to Montfermeil, in order to obey the injunction
which his father had left him, and he sought the old sergeant
to Waterloo, the inn-keeper Thenardier. Thenardier had failed,
the inn was closed, and no one knew what had become of him.
Marius was away from the house for four days on this quest.
"He is getting decidedly wild," said his grandfather.
They thought they had noticed that he wore something on his breast,
under his shirt, which was attached to his neck by a black ribbon. _
Read next: VOLUME III: BOOK THIRD - THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON: CHAPTER VII. Some Petticoat
Read previous: VOLUME III: BOOK THIRD - THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON: CHAPTER V. The Utility of going to Mass, in order to become a Revolutionist
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