Part 168 (1/2)
”Bah!” retorted the boy, ”where's my father?”
”At La Force.”
”Come, now! And my mother?”
”At Saint-Lazare.”
”Well! And my sisters?”
”At the Madelonettes.”
The lad scratched his head behind his ear, stared at Ma'am Bougon, and said:--
”Ah!”
Then he executed a pirouette on his heel; a moment later, the old woman, who had remained on the door-step, heard him singing in his clear, young voice, as he plunged under the black elm-trees, in the wintry wind:--
”Le roi Coupdesabot[31]
S'en allait a la cha.s.se, A la cha.s.se aux corbeaux, Monte sur deux echa.s.ses.
Quand on pa.s.sait dessous, On lui payait deux sous.”
[THE END OF VOLUME III. ”MARIUS”]
VOLUME IV.--SAINT-DENIS.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Frontispiece Volume Four]
[Ill.u.s.tration: t.i.tlepage Volume Four]
THE IDYL IN THE RUE PLUMET AND THE EPIC IN THE RUE SAINT-DENIS
BOOK FIRST.--A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY
CHAPTER I--WELL CUT
1831 and 1832, the two years which are immediately connected with the Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking moments of history. These two years rise like two mountains midway between those which precede and those which follow them. They have a revolutionary grandeur. Precipices are to be distinguished there. The social ma.s.ses, the very a.s.sizes of civilization, the solid group of superposed and adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the ancient French formation, appear and disappear in them every instant, athwart the storm clouds of systems, of pa.s.sions, and of theories. These appearances and disappearances have been designated as movement and resistance.
At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul, can be descried s.h.i.+ning there.
This remarkable epoch is decidedly circ.u.mscribed and is beginning to be sufficiently distant from us to allow of our grasping the princ.i.p.al lines even at the present day.
We shall make the attempt.
The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult, and which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a halting-place.