CHAPTER XII

THE GRANDFATHER


Basque and the porter had carried Marius into the drawing-room,
as he still lay stretched out, motionless, on the sofa upon
which he had been placed on his arrival. The doctor who had
been sent for had hastened thither. Aunt Gillenormand had risen.

Aunt Gillenormand went and came, in affright, wringing her hands and
incapable of doing anything but saying: "Heavens! is it possible?"
At times she added: "Everything will be covered with blood."
When her first horror had passed off, a certain philosophy of the
situation penetrated her mind, and took form in the exclamation:
"It was bound to end in this way!" She did not go so far as:
"I told you so!" which is customary on this sort of occasion.
At the physician's orders, a camp bed had been prepared beside the sofa.
The doctor examined Marius, and after having found that his pulse
was still beating, that the wounded man had no very deep wound on
his breast, and that the blood on the corners of his lips proceeded
from his nostrils, he had him placed flat on the bed, without a pillow,
with his head on the same level as his body, and even a trifle lower,
and with his bust bare in order to facilitate respiration.
Mademoiselle Gillenormand, on perceiving that they were undressing
Marius, withdrew. She set herself to telling her beads in her
own chamber.

The trunk had not suffered any internal injury; a bullet,
deadened by the pocket-book, had turned aside and made the tour
of his ribs with a hideous laceration, which was of no great depth,
and consequently, not dangerous. The long, underground journey had
completed the dislocation of the broken collar-bone, and the disorder
there was serious. The arms had been slashed with sabre cuts.
Not a single scar disfigured his face; but his head was fairly covered
with cuts; what would be the result of these wounds on the head?
Would they stop short at the hairy cuticle, or would they attack
the brain? As yet, this could not be decided. A grave symptom was
that they had caused a swoon, and that people do not always recover
from such swoons. Moreover, the wounded man had been exhausted
by hemorrhage. From the waist down, the barricade had protected
the lower part of the body from injury.

Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and prepared bandages; Nicolette
sewed them, Basque rolled them. As lint was lacking, the doctor,
for the time being, arrested the bleeding with layers of wadding.
Beside the bed, three candles burned on a table where the case
of surgical instruments lay spread out. The doctor bathed Marius'
face and hair with cold water. A full pail was reddened in an instant.
The porter, candle in hand, lighted them.

The doctor seemed to be pondering sadly. From time to time,
he made a negative sign with his head, as though replying to some
question which he had inwardly addressed to himself.

A bad sign for the sick man are these mysterious dialogues
of the doctor with himself.

At the moment when the doctor was wiping Marius' face, and lightly
touching his still closed eyes with his finger, a door opened
at the end of the drawing-room, and a long, pallid figure made
its appearance.

This was the grandfather.

The revolt had, for the past two days, deeply agitated, enraged and
engrossed the mind of M. Gillenormand. He had not been able to sleep
on the previous night, and he had been in a fever all day long.
In the evening, he had gone to bed very early, recommending that
everything in the house should be well barred, and he had fallen
into a doze through sheer fatigue.

Old men sleep lightly; M. Gillenormand's chamber adjoined
the drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had
been taken, the noise had awakened him. Surprised at the rift
of light which he saw under his door, he had risen from his bed,
and had groped his way thither.

He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the handle of the
half-open door, with his head bent a little forward and quivering,
his body wrapped in a white dressing-gown, which was straight
and as destitute of folds as a winding-sheet; and he had the air
of a phantom who is gazing into a tomb.

He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man, bleeding,
white with a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and gaping mouth,
and pallid lips, stripped to the waist, slashed all over with
crimson wounds, motionless and brilliantly lighted up.

The grandfather trembled from head to foot as powerfully as ossified
limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneae were yellow on account
of his great age, were veiled in a sort of vitreous glitter,
his whole face assumed in an instant the earthy angles of a skull,
his arms fell pendent, as though a spring had broken, and his
amazement was betrayed by the outspreading of the fingers of his
two aged hands, which quivered all over, his knees formed an angle
in front, allowing, through the opening in his dressing-gown,
a view of his poor bare legs, all bristling with white hairs,
and he murmured:

"Marius!"

"Sir," said Basque, "Monsieur has just been brought back.
He went to the barricade, and . . ."

"He is dead!" cried the old man in a terrible voice. "Ah! The rascal!"

Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up this
centenarian as erect as a young man.

"Sir," said he, "you are the doctor. Begin by telling me one thing.
He is dead, is he not?"

The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety, remained silent.

M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of terrible laughter.

"He is dead! He is dead! He is dead! He has got himself
killed on the barricades! Out of hatred to me! He did that to
spite me! Ah! You blood-drinker! This is the way he returns to me!
Misery of my life, he is dead!"

He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he were stifling,
and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk into the street,
to the night:

"Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces! Just look
at that, the villain! He knew well that I was waiting for him,
and that I had had his room arranged, and that I had placed at
the head of my bed his portrait taken when he was a little child!
He knew well that he had only to come back, and that I had been
recalling him for years, and that I remained by my fireside,
with my hands on my knees, not knowing what to do, and that I was mad
over it! You knew well, that you had but to return and to say:
`It is I,' and you would have been the master of the house, and that I
should have obeyed you, and that you could have done whatever you
pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather! you knew that well,
and you said:

"No, he is a Royalist, I will not go! And you went to the barricades,
and you got yourself killed out of malice! To revenge yourself
for what I said to you about Monsieur le Duc de Berry.
It is infamous! Go to bed then and sleep tranquilly! he is dead,
and this is my awakening."

The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both quarters,
quitted Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand, and took his arm.
The grandfather turned round, gazed at him with eyes which seemed
exaggerated in size and bloodshot, and said to him calmly:

"I thank you, sir. I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death
of Louis XVI., I know how to bear events. One thing is terrible and
that is to think that it is your newspapers which do all the mischief.
You will have scribblers, chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes,
discussions, progress, enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty
of the press, and this is the way that your children will be brought
home to you. Ah! Marius! It is abominable! Killed! Dead before me!
A barricade! Ah, the scamp! Doctor, you live in this quarter,
I believe? Oh! I know you well. I see your cabriolet pass
my window. I am going to tell you. You are wrong to think that I
am angry. One does not fly into a rage against a dead man.
That would be stupid. This is a child whom I have reared.
I was already old while he was very young. He played in the
Tuileries garden with his little shovel and his little chair,
and in order that the inspectors might not grumble, I stopped up
the holes that he made in the earth with his shovel, with my cane.
One day he exclaimed: Down with Louis XVIII.! and off he went.
It was no fault of mine. He was all rosy and blond. His mother
is dead. Have you ever noticed that all little children are blond?
Why is it so? He is the son of one of those brigands of the Loire,
but children are innocent of their fathers' crimes. I remember when he
was no higher than that. He could not manage to pronounce his Ds.
He had a way of talking that was so sweet and indistinct that you
would have thought it was a bird chirping. I remember that once,
in front of the Hercules Farnese, people formed a circle to admire
him and marvel at him, he was so handsome, was that child!
He had a head such as you see in pictures. I talked in a deep voice,
and I frightened him with my cane, but he knew very well that it
was only to make him laugh. In the morning, when he entered my room,
I grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all the same.
One cannot defend oneself against those brats. They take hold of you,
they hold you fast, they never let you go again. The truth is,
that there never was a cupid like that child. Now, what can you say
for your Lafayettes, your Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de
Corcelles who have killed him? This cannot be allowed to pass in
this fashion."

He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless, and to
whom the physician had returned, and began once more to wring
his hands. The old man's pallid lips moved as though mechanically,
and permitted the passage of words that were barely audible,
like breaths in the death agony:

"Ah! heartless lad! Ah! clubbist! Ah! wretch! Ah! Septembrist!"

Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed to a corpse.

Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal
eruptions should come to the light, the sequence of words returned,
but the grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength
to utter them, his voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed
to come from the other side of an abyss:

"It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, that I am.
And to think that there is not a hussy in Paris who would not have
been delighted to make this wretch happy! A scamp who, instead of
amusing himself and enjoying life, went off to fight and get himself
shot down like a brute! And for whom? Why? For the Republic!
Instead of going to dance at the Chaumiere, as it is the duty of young
folks to do! What's the use of being twenty years old? The Republic,
a cursed pretty folly! Poor mothers, beget fine boys, do! Come, he
is dead. That will make two funerals under the same carriage gate.
So you have got yourself arranged like this for the sake of General
Lamarque's handsome eyes! What had that General Lamarque done to you?
A slasher! A chatter-box! To get oneself killed for a dead man!
If that isn't enough to drive any one mad! Just think of it!
At twenty! And without so much as turning his head to see whether
he was not leaving something behind him! That's the way poor,
good old fellows are forced to die alone, now-adays. Perish in
your corner, owl! Well, after all, so much the better, that is
what I was hoping for, this will kill me on the spot. I am too old,
I am a hundred years old, I am a hundred thousand years old, I ought,
by rights, to have been dead long ago. This blow puts an end to it.
So all is over, what happiness! What is the good of making him
inhale ammonia and all that parcel of drugs? You are wasting
your trouble, you fool of a doctor! Come, he's dead, completely dead.
I know all about it, I am dead myself too. He hasn't done things
by half. Yes, this age is infamous, infamous and that's what I
think of you, of your ideas, of your systems, of your masters,
of your oracles, of your doctors, of your scape-graces of writers,
of your rascally philosophers, and of all the revolutions which,
for the last sixty years, have been frightening the flocks of crows
in the Tuileries! But you were pitiless in getting yourself killed
like this, I shall not even grieve over your death, do you understand,
you assassin?"

At that moment, Marius slowly opened his eyes, and his glance,
still dimmed by lethargic wonder, rested on M. Gillenormand.

"Marius!" cried the old man. "Marius! My little Marius! my
child! my well-beloved son! You open your eyes, you gaze upon me,
you are alive, thanks!"

And he fell fainting.