Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the one hundred seventieth chapter of Les Miserables.

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Today we'll be continuing les Miserables by Victor Hugo chapter three requiescent Madame de t's salon was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of the world. It was the only opening through which he could get a glimpse of life. This opening was somber and more cold than warmth.

More night than day came to him through the skylight. This child, who had been all joy and light on entering the strange world, soon became melancholy.

And what is still more contrary to his age, grave, surrounded by all those singular and imposing personages, he gazed about him with serious amazement. Everything conspired to increase this astonishment in him.

There were in Madame de t's salon some very noble ladies named Mathenae Noe, Levis, which was pronounced Levi, cambys pronounced cambyus. These antique visages and these biblical names mingled in the childs mind with the Old Testament, which he was learning by heart.

And when they were all there, seated in a circle around a dying fire, sparely lighted by a lamp shaded with green, with their severe profiles, their gray or white hair, their long gowns of another age, whose lugubrious colors could not be distinguished, dropping at rare intervals words which were both majestic and severe. Little Marius stared at them with frightened eyes in the conviction that he beheld not women, but patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms.

With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled frequenters of this ancient salon, and some gentlemen, the marquis de Sasse, private secretary to Madame de Berry, the vicomte de Val, who published under the pseudonym of Charles Antoine Monorim d'Odis, the prince de Boeuf, who, though very young, had a grey head and a pretty and witty wife, whose very low necked toilettes of scarlet velvet with gold torsades alarmed the shadows.

The marquis de CI de a, the man in all France who best understood proportioned politeness, the count d'eymore, a kindly man with the amiable chin, and the Chevalier de Portgai, a pillar of the library of the louvre called the kings cabinet.

Their business was to go at night and gather up on the scaffold the heads and bodies of the persons who had been guillotined during the day. They bore away on their backs.

These dripping corpses and their red galley slave blouses had a clot of blood at the back of the neck, which was dry in the morning and wet at night. These tragic tales abounded in Madame de ts Salon, and by dint of cursing merit they applauded Trestallian.

Some deputies of the undiscoverable variety played their whist there Monsieur Thibault de Chaillard, Monsieur le Marchant de Gomecourt, and the celebrated scoffer of the rite, Monsieur Cornet Dincourt. The bailiff de ferret with his short breeches and his thin legs, sometimes traversed the salon on his way to Monsieur de Talleyrand.

He had been Monsieur le Count d'Artois companion in pleasures, and unlike Aristotle, crouching under Campaspe, he had made the gemard crawl on all fours, and in that way he had exhibited to the ages a philosopher avenged by bailiff.

As for the priests, there was the abbe Helma, the same to whom Monsieur Laros, his collaborator on Lafandre, said, bah, who is there who is not 50 years old?

A few greenhorns, perhaps the abbe Latournier, preacher to the king, the abbe Fresnius, who was not as yet either count or bishop or minister or peer, and who wore an old cassock whose buttons were missing and the abbe caravant cure of Saint Germain des Pres, also the pope's nuncio, then Monsignor Macchi, archbishop of Nisibi, later on, cardinal, remarkable for his long, pensive nose and another monsignor, entitled das abate palmieri, domestic prelate, or one of the seven participant procenitaries of the Holy See, canon of the illustrious librarian basilica, advocate of the saints postulatory de santi, which refers to the matters of canonization and signifies very nearly master of requests of the section of paradise. Lastly, two cardinals, M. De la Luzerne and M. De Claty.

The cardinal of Luzerne was a writer and was destined to have, a few years later, the honor of signing in the conservator articles side by side with Chateaubriand. Monsieur de Clity was archbishop of Toul and often made trips to Paris to his nephew, the marquet de T, who, who was minister of marine and war.

The cardinal of Clotilde was a merry little man who displayed his red stockings beneath his tucked up cassock.

His specialty was a hatred of the encyclopedia and his desperate play at billiards, and persons who at that epoch passed through the rue aim on summer evenings where the Hotel des Clitie then stood halted to listen to the shock of the balls and the piercing voice of the cardinal shouting to his convocist, Monsignor Coderat, bishop and partabus of Kirsty Mark, Abb. I make a canon.

The cardinal de Claty had been brought to Madame de ts by most intimate friend, Monsieur de Roquellours, former bishop of Senlis and one of the 40. Monsieur de Roquellours was notable for his lofty figure and his assiduity at the academy.

Through the glass door of the neighboring hall of the library, where the french academy then held its meetings, the curious could, on every Tuesday contemplate the ex bishop of Senlis, usually standing erect, freshly powdered in violet hose, with his back turned to the door, apparently for the purpose of allowing a better view of his little collar.

All these ecclesiastics, though for the most part as most courtiers, as churchmen, added to the gravity of the te salon, whose seignorial aspect was accentuated by five peers of France, the marquis de Verbe, the marquis de Tailles, the marquis de Herbes, the viscount dam, and the duc de Valles.

This duc de Valle, although Prince de Mon, that is to say, a reigning prince abroad, had so high an idea of France and its peerage that he viewed everything through their medium. It was he who said, the cardinals are the peers of France, of Rome, the lords are the peers of France, of England.

Moreover, as it is indispensable that the revolution should be everywhere in this century, this feudal salon was, as we have said, dominated by a bourgeois. Monsieur de Lenormand reigned there. There lay the essence and quintessence of the parisian white society.

Their reputations, even royalist reputations, were held in quarantine. There is always a trace of anarchy. And renowned Chateau priend, had he entered there, would have produced the effect of Pere duchenne.

Some of this, scoffed at, did nevertheless penetrate thither on sufferance. Count Bugue was received there, subject to correction. The noble salons of the present day no longer resemble those salons.

The Faubourg Saint Germain reeks of the faggot. Even now the royalists of today are demagogues. Let us record it to their credit. At Madame de Teas the society was superior.

Taste was exquisite and haughty.

Under the COVID of a great show of politeness, manners there admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements, which were the old regime itself buried but still alive.

Some of these habits, especially in the matter of language, seem eccentric persons, but superficially acquainted with them, would have taken for provincial that which was only antique. A woman was called Madame le Gnral. Madame le Cournel was not entirely disused.

The charming Madame de Leon, in memory, no doubt, of the duchesses de Longueville and de Chouvarus, preferred this appellation of their title to princess. The marquis de Crequy was also called Madame le Colonel.

It was this little high society which invented at the Tuileries the refinement of speaking to the king in private as the kingdom in the third person, and never as your majesty. The designation of your majesty, having been soiled by the usurper, men in deeds were brought to judgment.

There they jeered at the age which released them from the necessity of understanding it. They abetted each other in amazement. They communicated to each other that modicum of light which they possessed.

Methuselah bestowed information on epimenies. The deaf man made the blind man acquainted with the course of things.

They declared that the time which had elapsed since Koblenz had not existed in the same manner that Louis XVIII was by the grace of God in the five and 20th year of his reign. The emigrants were by rights in the five and 20th year of their adolescence. All was harmonious. Nothing was too much alive.

Speech hardly amounted to a breath. The newspapers agreeing with the salons seemed a papyrus. There were some young people, but they were rather dead.

The liveries in the antechamber were antiquated. These utterly obsolete personages were served by domestics of the same stamp.

They all had the air of having lived a long time ago and of obstinately resisting the sepulchre. Nearly the whole dictionary consisted of conserver, conservation, conservator, to be in good odor. That was the point.

There are in fact aromatics in the opinions of these venerable groups, and their ideas smelled of it. It was a mummified society. The masters were embalmed, the servants were stuffed with straw.

A worthy old marquis, an emigre and ruined, who had but a solitary maid, continued to say, my people, what did they do in Madame deity's salon? They were ultra. To be ultra. This word, although what it represents may not have disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day.

Let us explain it. To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the scepter in the name of the throne and the mitre in the name of the altar.

It is to ill treat the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces. It is to cavil at the faggot on the score of the amount of cooking received by the heredex.

It is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry. It is to insult through excess of respect.

It is to discover that the pope is not sufficiently papish, that the king is not sufficiently royal, and that the knight has too much light. It is to be discontented with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily, in the name of whiteness.

It is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming their enemy. It is to be so strongly for as to be against the ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase of the restoration.

At one and the same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and somberland, illuminated as by the radiance of dawn, and entirely covered at the same time with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still filled the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past. There existed in that light, in that shadow, a complete little new and old world, comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was rubbing its eyes.

Nothing resembles an awakening like a return. A group which regarded France with ill temper and which France regarded with irony.

Good old owls and marquises by the streetful who had returned, and of ghosts, the former subjects of amazement at everything.

Brave and noble, gentlemen who smiled at being in France but wept, also delighted to behold their country once more in despair at not finding their monarchy. The nobility of the crusades treating the nobility of the empire, that is to say, the nobility of the sword with scorn.

Historic races who had lost the sense of history. The sons of the companions of Charlemagne, disdaining the companions of Napoleon. The swords, as we have just remarked, returned the insult.

The sword of Fontenoy was laughable and nothing but a scrap of rusty iron. The sword of Marigno was odious and was only a sabre. Former days did not recognize. Yesterday, people no longer had the feeling for what was grand.

There was someone who called Bonaparte Skapin. This society no longer exists.

Nothing of it, we repeat, exists today, when we select from it some one figure at random, an attempt to make it live again in thought. It seems as strange to us as the world before the deluge. It is because it too, as a matter of fact, has been engulfed in a deluge.

It has disappeared beneath two revolutions. What billows are ideas, how quickly they cover all that. It is their mission to destroy and to bury and how promptly they create frightful gulfs.

Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and candid times when Monsieur Martinville had more wit than Voltaire. These salons had a literature and politics of their own. They believed in Phbe. Monsieur Eger laid down the law in them.

They commentated Monsieur Cornette, the old bookseller and publicist on the Quai Malacquay. Napoleon was to them thoroughly the corsican ogre.

Their way was to be royalists and to excuse themselves for being so. Where the ultras were very proud, the doctrinarians were rather ashamed. They had wit, they had silence.

Their political dogma was suitably impregnated with arrogance. They should have succeeded. They indulged, and youthfully, too, in excesses in the matter of white neckties and tightly buttoned coats.

The mistake of the misfortune of the doctrinarian party was to create aged youth. They assumed the poses of wise men. They dreamed of engrafting a temperate power on the absolute and excessive principle.

They opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative liberalism. To the liberalism which demolishes, they were heard to say thanks for royalism. It has rendered more than one service.

It has brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect. It is faithful, brave, chivalric, loving, devoted.

It has mingled, though with regret, the secular grandeurs of the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the nation. Its mistake is not to understand the revolution, the empire, glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age.

But this mistake which it makes with regard to us, have we not sometimes been guilty of it? Towards them, the revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to be intelligent on all points. To attack royalism is a misconstruction of liberalism.

What an error and what blindness revolutionary France is wanting in respect towards historic France, that is to say, towards its mother, that is to say, towards itself. After the 5 September, the nobility of the monarchy is treated as the nobility of the empire was treated. After the 5 July.

They were unjust to the eagle. We are unjust to the fleur de lis. It seems that we must always have something to proscribe.

Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis XIV, to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV? We scoff at Monsieur de Vaublanc for erasing the inns from the bridge of Jaina. What was it that he did? What are we doing?

Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo. The fleur de lis are ours as well as the NS. That is our patrimony. To what purpose shall we diminish it?

We must not deny our country in the past any more than in the present. Why not accept the whole of history? Why not love the whole of France?

It is thus that doctrinates criticized and protected royalism, which was displeased at criticism and furious at protection. The ultras marked the first epic of royalism. Congregation characterized the second skill followed ardor. Let us confine ourselves here to this sketch.

In this course of this narrative, the author of this book has encountered in his path this curious moment of contemporary history. He has been forced to cast a passing glance upon it and to trace once more some of the singular features of this society which is unknown today.

But he does it rapidly and without any bitter or derisive idea. Souvenirs both respectful and affectionate, for they touch his mother attract him to this past.

Moreover, let us remark, the same petty world had a grandeur of its own. 1 may smile at it, but one can neither despise nor hate it. It was the France of former days.

Marius Pontmercy pursued some studies, as all children do. When he emerged from the hand of aunt Jill Normand, his grandfather confided him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic innocence.

This young soul, which was expanding, passed from a prude to a vulgar pedanthe. Marius went through his years of college, then he entered the law school. He was a royalist, fanatical and severe.

He did not love his grandfather much, as the latter's gaiety and cynicism repelled him. And his feelings towards his father were gloomy.

He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous, proud, religious, enthusiastic lad, dignified to harshness, pure to shyness. Thank you for joining bite at a time books today while we wrote a bite of one of your favorite classics. Again.

My name is Brie Carlisle, and I hope you come back tomorrow for the next bite of le miserable.