________________________________________________
_ Everything was made ready for the wedding. The doctor,
on being consulted, declared that it might take place in February.
It was then December. A few ravishing weeks of perfect happiness passed.
The grandfather was not the least happy of them all. He remained
for a quarter of an hour at a time gazing at Cosette.
"The wonderful, beautiful girl!" he exclaimed. "And she has so sweet
and good an air! she is, without exception, the most charming girl
that I have ever seen in my life. Later on, she'll have virtues
with an odor of violets. How graceful! one cannot live otherwise
than nobly with such a creature. Marius, my boy, you are a Baron,
you are rich, don't go to pettifogging, I beg of you."
Cosette and Marius had passed abruptly from the sepulchre to paradise.
The transition had not been softened, and they would have been stunned,
had they not been dazzled by it.
"Do you understand anything about it?" said Marius to Cosette.
"No," replied Cosette, "but it seems to me that the good God
is caring for us."
Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed away every difficulty,
arranged everything, made everything easy. He hastened towards
Cosette's happiness with as much ardor, and, apparently with
as much joy, as Cosette herself.
As he had been a mayor, he understood how to solve that delicate
problem, with the secret of which he alone was acquainted,
Cosette's civil status. If he were to announce her origin bluntly,
it might prevent the marriage, who knows? He extricated
Cosette from all difficulties. He concocted for her a family
of dead people, a sure means of not encountering any objections.
Cosette was the only scion of an extinct family; Cosette was not
his own daughter, but the daughter of the other Fauchelevent.
Two brothers Fauchelevent had been gardeners to the convent of
the Petit-Picpus. Inquiry was made at that convent; the very best
information and the most respectable references abounded; the good nuns,
not very apt and but little inclined to fathom questions of paternity,
and not attaching any importance to the matter, had never understood
exactly of which of the two Fauchelevents Cosette was the daughter.
They said what was wanted and they said it with zeal. An acte de
notoriete was drawn up. Cosette became in the eyes of the law,
Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent. She was declared an orphan,
both father and mother being dead. Jean Valjean so arranged it
that he was appointed, under the name of Fauchelevent, as Cosette's
guardian, with M. Gillenormand as supervising guardian over him.
As for the five hundred and eighty thousand francs, they constituted
a legacy bequeathed to Cosette by a dead person, who desired
to remain unknown. The original legacy had consisted of five
hundred and ninety-four thousand francs; but ten thousand francs
had been expended on the education of Mademoiselle Euphrasie,
five thousand francs of that amount having been paid to the convent.
This legacy, deposited in the hands of a third party, was to be turned
over to Cosette at her majority, or at the date of her marriage.
This, taken as a whole, was very acceptable, as the reader will perceive,
especially when the sum due was half a million. There were some
peculiarities here and there, it is true, but they were not noticed;
one of the interested parties had his eyes blindfolded by love,
the others by the six hundred thousand francs.
Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of that old man
whom she had so long called father. He was merely a kinsman;
another Fauchelevent was her real father. At any other time this
would have broken her heart. But at the ineffable moment which she
was then passing through, it cast but a slight shadow, a faint cloud,
and she was so full of joy that the cloud did not last long.
She had Marius. The young man arrived, the old man was effaced;
such is life.
And then, Cosette had, for long years, been habituated to seeing
enigmas around her; every being who has had a mysterious childhood
is always prepared for certain renunciations.
Nevertheless, she continued to call Jean Valjean: Father.
Cosette, happy as the angels, was enthusiastic over Father Gillenormand.
It is true that he overwhelmed her with gallant compliments
and presents. While Jean Valjean was building up for Cosette a normal
situation in society and an unassailable status, M. Gillenormand
was superintending the basket of wedding gifts. Nothing so
amused him as being magnificent. He had given to Cosette a robe
of Binche guipure which had descended to him from his own grandmother.
"These fashions come up again," said he, "ancient things are
the rage, and the young women of my old age dress like the old
women of my childhood."
He rifled his respectable chests of drawers in Coromandel lacquer,
with swelling fronts, which had not been opened for years.--"Let us
hear the confession of these dowagers," he said, "let us see what they
have in their paunches." He noisily violated the pot-bellied drawers
of all his wives, of all his mistresses and of all his grandmothers.
Pekins, damasks, lampas, painted moires, robes of shot gros
de Tours, India kerchiefs embroidered in gold that could be washed,
dauphines without a right or wrong side, in the piece, Genoa and
Alencon point lace, parures in antique goldsmith's work, ivory bon-bon
boxes ornamented with microscopic battles, gewgaws and ribbons--
he lavished everything on Cosette. Cosette, amazed, desperately in
love with Marius, and wild with gratitude towards M. Gillenormand,
dreamed of a happiness without limit clothed in satin and velvet.
Her wedding basket seemed to her to be upheld by seraphim.
Her soul flew out into the azure depths, with wings of Mechlin lace.
The intoxication of the lovers was only equalled, as we have
already said, by the ecstasy of the grandfather. A sort of flourish
of trumpets went on in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.
Every morning, a fresh offering of bric-a-brac from the grandfather
to Cosette. All possible knickknacks glittered around her.
One day Marius, who was fond of talking gravely in the midst
of his bliss, said, apropos of I know not what incident:
"The men of the revolution are so great, that they have the prestige
of the ages, like Cato and like Phocion, and each one of them
seems to me an antique memory."
"Moire antique!" exclaimed the old gentleman. "Thanks, Marius.
That is precisely the idea of which I was in search."
And on the following day, a magnificent dress of tea-rose colored
moire antique was added to Cosette's wedding presents.
From these fripperies, the grandfather extracted a bit of wisdom.
"Love is all very well; but there must be something else to go
with it. The useless must be mingled with happiness. Happiness is
only the necessary. Season that enormously with the superfluous
for me. A palace and her heart. Her heart and the Louvre.
Her heart and the grand waterworks of Versailles. Give me my
shepherdess and try to make her a duchess. Fetch me Phyllis crowned
with corn-flowers, and add a hundred thousand francs income.
Open for me a bucolic perspective as far as you can see, beneath a
marble colonnade. I consent to the bucolic and also to the fairy
spectacle of marble and gold. Dry happiness resembles dry bread.
One eats, but one does not dine. I want the superfluous,
the useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose.
I remember to have seen, in the Cathedral of Strasburg, a clock,
as tall as a three-story house which marked the hours, which had
the kindness to indicate the hour, but which had not the air of being
made for that; and which, after having struck midday, or midnight,--
midday, the hour of the sun, or midnight, the hour of love,--
or any other hour that you like, gave you the moon and the stars,
the earth and the sea, birds and fishes, Phoebus and Phoebe, and a
host of things which emerged from a niche, and the twelve apostles,
and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and Eponine, and Sabinus,
and a throng of little gilded goodmen, who played on the trumpet
to boot. Without reckoning delicious chimes which it sprinkled
through the air, on every occasion, without any one's knowing why.
Is a petty bald clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to that?
For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg,
and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest."
M. Gillenormand talked nonsense in connection with the wedding,
and all the fripperies of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell
through his dithyrambs.
"You are ignorant of the art of festivals. You do not know
how to organize a day of enjoyment in this age," he exclaimed.
"Your nineteenth century is weak. It lacks excess. It ignores
the rich, it ignores the noble. In everything it is clean-shaven.
Your third estate is insipid, colorless, odorless, and shapeless.
The dreams of your bourgeois who set up, as they express it:
a pretty boudoir freshly decorated, violet, ebony and calico.
Make way! Make way! the Sieur Curmudgeon is marrying Mademoiselle
Clutch-penny. Sumptuousness and splendor. A louis d'or has been
stuck to a candle. There's the epoch for you. My demand is that I
may flee from it beyond the Sarmatians. Ah! in 1787, I predict
that all was lost, from the day when I beheld the Duc de Rohan,
Prince de Leon, Duc de Chabot, Duc de Montbazon, Marquis de Sonbise,
Vicomte de Thouars, peer of France, go to Longchamps in a tapecu!
That has borne its fruits. In this century, men attend to business,
they gamble on 'Change, they win money, they are stingy. People take
care of their surfaces and varnish them; every one is dressed as though
just out of a band-box, washed, soaped, scraped, shaved, combed, waked,
smoothed, rubbed, brushed, cleaned on the outside, irreproachable,
polished as a pebble, discreet, neat, and at the same time,
death of my life, in the depths of their consciences they have
dung-heaps and cesspools that are enough to make a cow-herd who blows
his nose in his fingers, recoil. I grant to this age the device:
`Dirty Cleanliness.' Don't be vexed, Marius, give me permission
to speak; I say no evil of the people as you see, I am always
harping on your people, but do look favorably on my dealing a bit
of a slap to the bourgeoisie. I belong to it. He who loves well
lashes well. Thereupon, I say plainly, that now-a-days people marry,
but that they no longer know how to marry. Ah! it is true, I regret
the grace of the ancient manners. I regret everything about them,
their elegance, their chivalry, those courteous and delicate ways,
that joyous luxury which every one possessed, music forming part of
the wedding, a symphony above stairs, a beating of drums below stairs,
the dances, the joyous faces round the table, the fine-spun
gallant compliments, the songs, the fireworks, the frank laughter,
the devil's own row, the huge knots of ribbon. I regret the
bride's garter. The bride's garter is cousin to the girdle of Venus.
On what does the war of Troy turn? On Helen's garter, parbleu!
Why did they fight, why did Diomed the divine break over the head
of Meriones that great brazen helmet of ten points? why did Achilles
and Hector hew each other up with vast blows of their lances?
Because Helen allowed Paris to take her garter. With Cosette's garter,
Homer would construct the Iliad. He would put in his poem,
a loquacious old fellow, like me, and he would call him Nestor.
My friends, in bygone days, in those amiable days of yore,
people married wisely; they had a good contract, and then they
had a good carouse. As soon as Cujas had taken his departure,
Gamacho entered. But, in sooth! the stomach is an agreeable beast
which demands its due, and which wants to have its wedding also.
People supped well, and had at table a beautiful neighbor without
a guimpe so that her throat was only moderately concealed.
Oh! the large laughing mouths, and how gay we were in those days!
youth was a bouquet; every young man terminated in a branch of
lilacs or a tuft of roses; whether he was a shepherd or a warrior;
and if, by chance, one was a captain of dragoons, one found means
to call oneself Florian. People thought much of looking well.
They embroidered and tinted themselves. A bourgeois had the air
of a flower, a Marquis had the air of a precious stone. People had
no straps to their boots, they had no boots. They were spruce,
shining, waved, lustrous, fluttering, dainty, coquettish, which did not
at all prevent their wearing swords by their sides. The humming-bird
has beak and claws. That was the day of the Galland Indies. One of
the sides of that century was delicate, the other was magnificent;
and by the green cabbages! people amused themselves. To-day, people
are serious. The bourgeois is avaricious, the bourgeoise is a prude;
your century is unfortunate. People would drive away the Graces
as being too low in the neck. Alas! beauty is concealed as though
it were ugliness. Since the revolution, everything, including the
ballet-dancers, has had its trousers; a mountebank dancer must be grave;
your rigadoons are doctrinarian. It is necessary to be majestic.
People would be greatly annoyed if they did not carry their chins
in their cravats. The ideal of an urchin of twenty when he marries,
is to resemble M. Royer-Collard. And do you know what one
arrives at with that majesty? at being petty. Learn this:
joy is not only joyous; it is great. But be in love gayly then,
what the deuce! marry, when you marry, with fever and giddiness,
and tumult, and the uproar of happiness! Be grave in church,
well and good. But, as soon as the mass is finished, sarpejou! you
must make a dream whirl around the bride. A marriage should be
royal and chimerical; it should promenade its ceremony from the
cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup. I have a horror
of a paltry wedding. Ventregoulette! be in Olympus for that one day,
at least. Be one of the gods. Ah! people might be sylphs.
Games and Laughter, argiraspides; they are stupids. My friends,
every recently made bridegroom ought to be Prince Aldobrandini.
Profit by that unique minute in life to soar away to the empyrean
with the swans and the eagles, even if you do have to fall back
on the morrow into the bourgeoisie of the frogs. Don't economize
on the nuptials, do not prune them of their splendors; don't scrimp
on the day when you beam. The wedding is not the housekeeping.
Oh! if I were to carry out my fancy, it would be gallant, violins would
be heard under the trees. Here is my programme: sky-blue and silver.
I would mingle with the festival the rural divinities, I would
convoke the Dryads and the Nereids. The nuptials of Amphitrite,
a rosy cloud, nymphs with well dressed locks and entirely naked,
an Academician offering quatrains to the goddess, a chariot drawn by
marine monsters.
"Triton trottait devant, et tirait de sa conque
Des sons si ravissants qu'il ravissait quiconque!"[65]
--there's a festive programme, there's a good one, or else I know
nothing of such matters, deuce take it!"
[65] "Triton trotted on before, and drew from his conch-shell
sounds so ravishing that he delighted everyone!"
While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, was listening
to himself, Cosette and Marius grew intoxicated as they gazed
freely at each other.
Aunt Gillenormand surveyed all this with her imperturbable placidity.
Within the last five or six months she had experienced a certain
amount of emotions. Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding,
Marius brought back from a barricade, Marius dead, then living,
Marius reconciled, Marius betrothed, Marius wedding a poor girl,
Marius wedding a millionairess. The six hundred thousand francs
had been her last surprise. Then, her indifference of a girl taking
her first communion returned to her. She went regularly to service,
told her beads, read her euchology, mumbled Aves in one corner
of the house, while I love you was being whispered in the other,
and she beheld Marius and Cosette in a vague way, like two shadows.
The shadow was herself.
There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the soul,
neutralized by torpor, a stranger to that which may be designated as the
business of living, receives no impressions, either human, or pleasant
or painful, with the exception of earthquakes and catastrophes.
This devotion, as Father Gillenormand said to his daughter,
corresponds to a cold in the head. You smell nothing of life.
Neither any bad, nor any good odor.
Moreover, the six hundred thousand francs had settled the elderly
spinster's indecision. Her father had acquired the habit of taking
her so little into account, that he had not consulted her in the
matter of consent to Marius' marriage. He had acted impetuously,
according to his wont, having, a despot-turned slave, but a
single thought,--to satisfy Marius. As for the aunt,--it had not
even occurred to him that the aunt existed, and that she could have
an opinion of her own, and, sheep as she was, this had vexed her.
Somewhat resentful in her inmost soul, but impassible externally,
she had said to herself: "My father has settled the question of
the marriage without reference to me; I shall settle the question
of the inheritance without consulting him." She was rich, in fact,
and her father was not. She had reserved her decision on this point.
It is probable that, had the match been a poor one, she would have
left him poor. "So much the worse for my nephew! he is wedding
a beggar, let him be a beggar himself!" But Cosette's half-million
pleased the aunt, and altered her inward situation so far as this
pair of lovers were concerned. One owes some consideration to six
hundred thousand francs, and it was evident that she could not do
otherwise than leave her fortune to these young people, since they
did not need it.
It was arranged that the couple should live with the grandfather--
M. Gillenormand insisted on resigning to them his chamber,
the finest in the house. "That will make me young again," he said.
"It's an old plan of mine. I have always entertained the idea of
having a wedding in my chamber."
He furnished this chamber with a multitude of elegant trifles.
He had the ceiling and walls hung with an extraordinary stuff,
which he had by him in the piece, and which he believed to have
emanated from Utrecht with a buttercup-colored satin ground, covered
with velvet auricula blossoms.--"It was with that stuff," said he,
"that the bed of the Duchesse d'Anville at la Roche-Guyon was draped."--
On the chimney-piece, he set a little figure in Saxe porcelain,
carrying a muff against her nude stomach.
M. Gillenormand's library became the lawyer's study, which Marius needed;
a study, it will be remembered, being required by the council
of the order. _
Read next: VOLUME V: BOOK FIFTH - GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER: CHAPTER VII. The Effects of Dreams Mingled with Happiness
Read previous: VOLUME V: BOOK FIFTH - GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER: CHAPTER V. Deposit Your Money in a Forest Rather than with a Notary
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