But what I do know is, that there never was anything but scoundrels among those men!
They were all rascals, assassins, red-caps, thieves!
I say all!
I say all! I know not one!
I say all!
Do you hear me, Marius!
See here, you are no more a baron than my slipper is!
They were all bandits in the service of Robespierre!
All who served B-u-o-naparte were brigands!
They were all traitors who betrayed, betrayed, betrayed their legitimate king!
All cowards who fled before the Prussians and the English at Waterloo!
That is what I do know!
Whether Monsieur your father comes in that category, I do not know!
I am sorry for it, so much the worse, your humble servant!”
In his turn, it was Marius who was the firebrand and M. Gillenormand who was the bellows.
Marius quivered in every limb, he did not know what would happen next, his brain was on fire.
He was the priest who beholds all his sacred wafers cast to the winds, the fakir who beholds a passer-by spit upon his idol.
It could not be that such things had been uttered in his presence.
What was he to do?
His father had just been trampled under foot and stamped upon in his presence, but by whom?
By his grandfather.
How was he to avenge the one without outraging the other?
It was impossible for him to insult his grandfather and it was equally impossible for him to leave his father unavenged.
On the one hand was a sacred grave, on the other hoary locks.
He stood there for several moments, staggering as though intoxicated, with all this whirlwind dashing through his head; then he raised his eyes, gazed fixedly at his grandfather, and cried in a voice of thunder:—
“Down with the Bourbons, and that great hog of a Louis XVIII.!”
Louis XVIII. had been dead for four years; but it was all the same to him.
The old man, who had been crimson, turned whiter than his hair.
He wheeled round towards a bust of M. le Duc de Berry, which stood on the chimney-piece, and made a profound bow, with a sort of peculiar majesty.
Then he paced 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 polished floor creak as though he had been a stone statue walking.
On his second turn, he bent over his daughter, who was watching this encounter with the stupefied air of an antiquated lamb, and said to her with a smile that was almost calm:
“A baron like this gentleman, and a bourgeois like myself cannot remain under the same roof.”
And drawing himself up, all at once, pallid, trembling, terrible, with his brow rendered more lofty by the terrible radiance of wrath, he extended his arm towards Marius and shouted to him:—
“Be off!”
Marius left the house.
On the following day, M. Gillenormand said to his daughter:
“You will send sixty pistoles every six months to that blood-drinker, and you will never mention his name to me.”
Having an immense reserve fund of wrath to get rid of, and not knowing what to do with it, he continued to address his daughter as you instead of thou for the next three months.
Marius, on his side, had gone forth in indignation.
There was one circumstance which, it must be admitted, aggravated his exasperation.
There are always petty fatalities of the sort which complicate domestic dramas.
They augment the grievances in such cases, although, in reality, the wrongs are not increased by them.
While carrying Marius’ “duds” precipitately to his chamber, at his grandfather’s command, Nicolette had, inadvertently, let fall, probably, on the attic staircase, which was dark, that medallion of black shagreen which contained the paper penned by the colonel.
Neither paper nor case could afterwards be found.
Marius was convinced that “Monsieur Gillenormand”—from that day forth he never alluded to him otherwise—had flung “his father’s testament” in the fire.
He knew by heart the few lines which the colonel had written, and, consequently, nothing was lost.
But the paper, the writing, that sacred relic,—all that was his very heart.
What had been done with it?
Marius had taken his departure without saying whither he was going, and without knowing where, with thirty francs, his watch, and a few clothes in a hand-bag.
He had entered a hackney-coach, had engaged it by the hour, and had directed his course at hap-hazard towards the Latin quarter.