Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [218]
We see that, as for all converts to a religion, his conversion intoxicated him, he plunged headlong into adhesion, and he went too far. His nature was such; once on a slope it was almost impossible for him to hold back. Fanaticism for the sword took possession of him, and became complicated in his mind with enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that along with genius, and indiscriminately, he was admiring force, that is to say that he was installing in the two compartments of his idolatry, on one side what is divine, and on the other what is brutal. In several respects he began to deceive himself in other matters. He accepted everything. There is a way of meeting error while on the road of truth. He had a sort of wilful implicit faith which swallowed everything en masse. On the new path upon which he had entered, in judging the crimes of the ancient regime as well as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected the extenuating circumstances.
However this might be, a great step had been taken. Where he had formerly seen the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France. His pole-star was changed. What had been the setting, was now the rising of the sun. He had turned around.
All these revolutions were accomplished in him without a suspicion of it in his family.
When, in this mysterious labour, he had entirely cast off his old Bourbon and ultra skin, when he had shed the aristocrat, the jacobite, and the royalist, when he was fully revolutionary, thoroughly democratic, and almost republican, he went to an engraver on the Quai des Orfévres, and ordered a hundred cards bearing this name: Baron Marius Pontmercy.
This was but a very logical consequence of the change which had taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated about his father.
However, as he knew nobody, and could not leave his cards at anybody’s door, he put them in his pocket.
By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer to his father, his memory, and the things for which the colonel had fought for twenty-five years, he drew away from his grandfather. As we have mentioned, for a long time M. Gillenormand’s capriciousness had been disagreeable to him. There was already between them all the distaste of a serious young man for a frivolous old man. Geront’s gaiety shocks and exasperates Werther’s melancholy. So long as the same political opinions and the same ideas had been common to them, Marius had met M. Gillenormand by means of them as if upon a bridge. When this bridge fell, the abyss appeared. And then, above all, Marius felt inexpressibly revolted when he thought that M. Gillenormand, from stupid motives, had pitilessly torn him from the colonel, thus depriving the father of the child, and the child of the father.
Through affection and veneration for his father, Marius had almost reached aversion for his grandfather.
Nothing of this, however, as we have said, was betrayed externally. Only he was more and more frigid; laconic at meals, and scarcely ever in the house. When his aunt scolded him for it, he was very mild, and gave as an excuse his studies, courts, examinations, dissertations, etc. The grandfather did not change his infallible diagnosis: “In love? I understand it.”
Marius was absent for a while from time to time.
“Where can he go to?” asked the aunt.
On one of these journeys, which were always very short, he went to Montfermeil in obedience to the injunction which his father had left him, and sought for the former sergeant of Waterloo, the innkeeper Thénardier. Thénardier had failed, the inn was closed, and nobody knew what had become of him. While making these researches, Marius was away from the house four days.
“Decidedly,” said the grandfather, “he is going astray.”
They thought they noticed that he wore something, upon his breast and under his shirt, hung from his neck by a black ribbon.
Lieutenant Theodule Gillenormand, M. Gillenormand’s great-nephew, is a vain, handsome lancer (a member of a cavalry