Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [220]
“Pretty!”
A few minutes afterwards, Marius made his appearance. He came in. Even before crossing the threshold of the parlour, he perceived his grandfather holding one of his cards in his hand, who, on seeing him, exclaimed with his crushing air of sneering, bourgeois superiority:
“Stop! stop! stop! stop! stop! you are a baron now. I present you my compliments. What does this mean?”
Marius coloured slightly, and answered:
“It means that I am my father’s son.”
M. Gillenormand checked his laugh, and said harshly:
“Your father; I am your father.”
“My father,” resumed Marius with downcast eyes and stern manner, “was a humble and heroic man, who served the Republic and France glo riously, who was great in the greatest history that men have ever made, who lived a quarter of a century in the camp, by day under fire, by night in the snow, in the mud, and in the rain, who captured colours, who received twenty wounds, who died forgotten and abandoned, and who had but one fault; that was in loving too dearly two ingrates, his country and me.”
This was more than M. Gillenormand could listen to. At the word, Republic, he rose, or rather, sprang to his feet. Every one of the words which Marius had pronounced, had produced the effect upon the old royalist’s face, of a blast from a bellows upon a burning coal. From dark he had become red, from red purple, and from purple glowing.
“Marius!” exclaimed he, “abominable child! I don’t know what your father was! I don’t want to know! I know nothing about him and I don’t know him! but what I do know is, that there was never anything but miserable wretches among all that rabble! that they were all beggars, assassins, red caps, thieves! I say all! I say all! I know nobody! I say all! do you hear, Marius? Look you, indeed, you are as much a baron as my slipper! they were all bandits who served Robespierre! all brigands who served B-u-o-naparte! all traitors who betrayed, betrayed, betrayed! their legitimate king! all cowards who ran from the Prussians and English at Waterloo! That is what I know. If your father is among them I don’t know him, I am sorry for it, so much the worse, your servant!”
In his turn, Marius now became the coal, and M. Gillenormand the bellows. Marius shuddered in every limb, he knew not what to do, his head burned. He was the priest who sees all his wafers thrown to the winds, the fakir who sees a passer-by spit upon his idol. He could not allow such things to be said before him unanswered. But what could he do? His father had been trodden under foot and stamped upon in his presence, but by whom? by his grandfather. How should he avenge the one without outraging the other? It was impossible for him to insult his grandfather, and it was equally impossible for him not to avenge his father. On one hand a sacred tomb, on the other white hairs. He was for a few moments dizzy and staggering with all this whirlwind in his head; then he raised his eyes, looked straight at his grandfather, and cried in a thundering voice:
“Down with the Bourbons, and the great hog Louis XVIII!”
Louis XVIII had been dead for four years; but it was all the same to him.
The old man, scarlet as he was, suddenly became whiter than his hair. He turned towards a bust of the Duke de Berry which stood upon the mantel, and bowed to it profoundly with a sort of peculiar majesty. Then he walked twice, slowly and in silence, from the fireplace to the window and from the window to the fireplace, traversing the whole length of the room and making the floor crack as if an image of stone were walking over it. The second time, he bent towards his daughter, who was enduring the shock with the stupor of an aged sheep, and said to her with a smile that was almost calm:
“A baron like Monsieur and a bourgeois like me cannot remain under the same roof.”
And all at once straightening up, pallid, trembling, terrible, his forehead swelling with the fearful radiance of anger, he stretched his arm towards Marius and cried to him:
“Be off.”
Marius left the house.
The next day,