AT THE beginning of October 1815, and about an hour before sunset, a man travelling on foot entered the town of Digne. The few people who happened to be at their windows or doorways observed him with a vague misgiving. It would have been hard to find a traveller of more disreputable aspect. He was a man in the prime of life, of medium height, broad-shouldered and robust, who might have been in his late forties. A cap with a low leather peak half hid his face, which was tanned by sun and weather and glistened with sweat. His coarse yellow shirt, fastened at the neck with a small metal clasp, gaped to reveal a hairy chest. He wore a scarf twisted like a rope, threadbare duck trousers frayed at one knee and in holes at the other, and a tattered grey jacket patched over one elbow with a piece of green cloth sewn on with string. On his back was a new and bulging soldier’s knapsack and he carried a very large, knotted stick. His stockingless feet were in hob-nailed shoes and his beard was long. The dust and sweat of his day’s journey added a touch of squalor to his down-at-heel appearance. His head was shorn but stubbly, having evidently not been shaved for some days.
No one knew him. Presumably he was only passing through the town, having come from the south, and possibly from the coast, since he had entered by the road over which Napoleon had travelled seven months previously on his way from Cannes to Paris. He must have been walking all day, he seemed so tired. He was seen to stop and drink at the public drinking-fountain at the far end of the Boulevard Gassendi, on the outskirts of the town; but he was clearly very thirsty because some children who followed him saw him stop again, two hundred yards further on, at the fountain in the market-place.
At the corner of the Rue Poichevert he turned left towards the Town Hall, which he entered, emerging from it a quarter of an hour later. A gendarme was seated outside the door on the stone bench from which General Drouot, on 4 March, had read to the startled populace Napoleon’s famous Proclamation upon his landing in Golfe Juan. The stranger respectfully raised his cap. The gendarme did not acknowledge the salute but looked intently at him, watched him for some moments as he walked away, and then went into the building.
There was at that time a handsome inn in Digne bearing the sign of the Croix-de-Colbas. Its proprietor was a certain Jacquin Labarre, a man esteemed in the town because of his connection with another Labarre, proprietor of the inn of the Trois-Dauphins at Grenoble, who had served in the Guides. There had been many rumours concerning the Trois-Dauphins at the time of the Emperor’s landing. It was said that General Bertrand had paid the inn a number of surreptitious visits in the previous January, disguised as a carter, and had bestowed medals on soldiers and fistfuls of coin on certain citizens. The truth is that Napoleon, arriving at Grenoble, had politely refused the mayor’s offer of accommodation at the Prefecture saying that he was going to stop with a personal acquaintance, and had gone to the Trois-Dauphins. The reflected glory of the Trois-Dauphins Labarre extended over twenty-five leagues to the Labarre of the Croix-de-Colbas, who was referred to in the town as ‘the cousin of the one in Grenoble’.
The stranger made for this inn, the best in the district, and entered by way of the kitchen, which opened directly on to the street. All the cooking-stoves were lighted and a fire burned brightly in the hearth. The innkeeper, who was also the cook, was busy among his pots and pans preparing a meal for a party of waggoners who could be heard loudly talking and laughing in the next room. As every traveller knows, no one fares better than the waggoner. A plump marmot, flanked by partridges and grouse, was turning on a long spit in front of the fire, and two large carp from the Lac de Lauzet and a trout from the Lac d’Alloz were cooking on the stove.
Hearing the door open the innkeeper said without looking up:
‘What can I do for Monsieur?’
‘A meal and a bed,’ said the stranger.
‘By all means –’ but at this moment the innkeeper turned his head; after glancing at the visitor he added ‘– provided you can pay for it.’
‘I have money,’ said the stranger producing a shabby leather purse from his jacket pocket.
‘In that case you’re welcome.’
The man returned the purse to his pocket, dropped his knapsack on the floor by the door and, keeping hold of his stick, seated himself on a low stool by the fire. Digne is high in the hills and its October evenings are chilly. The innkeeper, still busy with his cooking, was none the less examining him.
‘Will dinner soon be ready?’ the man asked.
‘Quite soon.’
While the stranger warmed himself, seated with his back turned to the room, the worthy innkeeper, Jacquin Labarre, got a pencil out of his pocket and tore a strip off a newspaper lying on a table by the window. He scribbled a line or two, folded the strip and handed it to a youngster who appeared to serve him as scullery-boy and personal attendant. He murmured a few words and the boy ran off in the direction of the Town Hall.
The stranger had seen nothing of this. He asked for the second time:
‘Will dinner soon be ready?’
‘Quite soon.’
The boy returned with the scrap of paper, and the innkeeper unfolded it with the promptness of someone who has been anxious for a reply. He read the message with care, then nodded his head and stood for a moment reflecting. Finally, he went over to the stranger, who appeared to be plunged in unhappy thought.
‘I’m sorry, Monsieur. I can’t have you here.’
The man swung round, half-rising to his feet.
‘Why? Are you afraid I shan’t pay? Do you want me to pay in advance? I tell you, I’ve got the money.’
‘It isn’t that.’
‘Well, then?’
‘You have the money, but –’
‘But what?’
‘But I haven’t a room free.’
The stranger said calmly: ‘Then put me in the stable.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘The horses take up all the room.’
‘Well then, a corner of the hay-loft. A truss of straw. We can see to that after dinner.’
‘I can’t offer you dinner.’
The words, spoken in a firm, deliberate tone, seemed to shake the stranger.
‘But I’m dropping with hunger! I’ve been walking since daybreak. I’ve covered a dozen leagues. I must have something to eat.’
‘I’ve nothing to spare,’ said the innkeeper.
The stranger uttered a short laugh and pointed to the spit and the stove.
‘What’s all that?’
‘It’s all reserved.’
‘By whom?’
‘By the waggoners.’
‘How many are there?’
‘Twelve.’
‘There’s enough there for twenty.’
‘It’s what they ordered and they paid in advance.’
The stranger sat down again and said without raising his voice:
‘I’m at an inn and I’m hungry. I’m stopping here.’
The innkeeper then bent over him and said in a tone which caused him to start: ‘Get out.’
The stranger at the moment was bent forward in the act of thrusting a few cinders back into the fire with the metal ferrule of his stick. He swung round sharply, but as he opened his mouth to reply the innkeeper, looking hard at him, went on in a low voice:
‘That’s enough talk. Do you want me to tell you who you are? Your name is Jean Valjean. And now do you want me to tell you what you are? I had my suspicions when you came in. I sent a note to the Mairie and this is the reply. Can you read?’
He held out the scrap of paper and after the stranger had looked at it he went on:
‘I like to treat everyone politely. Kindly go away.’
The man rose, took up his knapsack and left.
He walked off seemingly at random along the main street, keeping close to the house fronts, his attitude one of dejected humiliation. He did not once look round. Had he done so he would have seen the proprietor of the Croix-de-Colbas standing in his doorway surrounded by a party of customers and passers-by, talking volubly and pointing towards him; and from the excited and hostile looks cast in his direction he would have realized that before long his arrival would be known throughout the town.
He saw nothing of this. A man crushed by misfortune does not look back, knowing only too well that ill-chance follows behind. He continued to walk blindly along streets unknown to him, for a time forgetful of his fatigue, such is the effect of despair. But he was suddenly conscious of an acute pang of hunger. It was growing dark. He looked about him, seeking some shelter for the night.
The better establishment was closed to him. What he sought now was the poorest of taverns, the humblest of lodgings for the poor. And as it happened a light shone at the end of the street; a torch of pine-twigs, hanging from a metal bracket, was visible against the pallor of the evening sky. He went towards it.
The place was the tavern at the end of the Rue de Chauffaut. The stranger paused for a moment at the window to peer inside at a low-ceilinged room lighted by a small table-lamp and the glow of a large fire. Some men were drinking while the host warmed himself at the fire, over which a stewpot bubbled hanging from a pot-hook.
There are two entrances to this tavern, which is also a species of hostelry, one giving on to the street and the other on to a small yard with a midden. The stranger did not venture to use the front entrance. He went into the yard, hesitated again, then diffidently raised the latch and pushed upon the door.
‘Who’s that?’ asked the innkeeper.
‘Someone looking for a meal and a bed.’
‘Then come in. We can give you both.’
He entered and the heads turned to gaze at him as he stood between the light of the lamp and the light of the fire. They watched in silence while he unloosed his knapsack.
‘There’s a stew cooking,’ the innkeeper said. ‘Come and warm yourself, friend.’
The man sat down by the hearth, stretching out his tired feet to the blaze. A pleasant smell rose from the stewpot. What could be seen of his face under the low-peaked cap conveyed a vague impression of well-being mingled with that other poignant aspect which comes of habitual suffering. In other respects it was a strong face, vigorous and melancholy; and it contained a strange contradiction, appearing at first sight humble but then seeming masterful. The eyes under heavy brows shone like fire under a thicket.
But one of the company was a fish-merchant who on his way to the tavern had put his horse in Labarre’s stable. As chance would have it, he had met this ill-favoured stranger that morning on the road between Bras d’Asse and some other village of which I forget the name. The man, who already seemed tired, had asked to be allowed to get up behind him, a request which the fishmonger had answered by digging his spurs into his horse. The fishmonger was one of the group which half an hour previously had clustered round Jacquin Labarre, and he had there told the story of this encounter. He now made a covert sign to the innkeeper, who went over to him. They exchanged a few words in an undertone while the stranger sat lost in thought.
Returning to his fireside, the host tapped the man on the shoulder and said:
‘You must clear out of here.’
The stranger looked up and said gently: ‘So you know?’
‘Yes.’
‘They turned me out of the other inn.’
‘You’re being turned out of this one.’
‘But where am I to go?’
‘Somewhere else.’
The man picked up his stick and knapsack and left.
Some boys who had followed him from the Croix-de-Colbas, and had evidently been waiting for him to emerge, flung stones at him as he did so. He swung round angrily brandishing his stick, and they scattered like a flock of birds.
He came to the prison. A bell-chain hung by the doorway and he pulled it. A panel in the door slid back.
‘Monsieur,’ said the man, removing his cap, ‘will you be so kind as to let me in and give me lodging for the night?’
‘This is a prison, not an inn,’ said the voice of the door-keeper. ‘If you want to be let in you must get yourself arrested.’ The panel closed.
The stranger moved on into a narrow street where there were a great many gardens, some enclosed only by hedges, to give it a cheerful appearance. Among the gardens and hedges was a small, one-storeyed house with a lighted window. Peering through this window as he had done at the tavern he saw a large, whitewashed room containing a bed draped with printed calico, a cradle standing in a corner, a few wooden chairs and a double-barrelled shotgun hanging on the wall. A table was laid in the middle of the room, and the light from a brass lamp fell upon a cloth of coarse white linen, a pewter jug shining like silver and filled with wine, and a steaming earthenware tureen. A man of about forty with an open, amiable face was seated at the table dancing a small child on his knee while near to him sat a young woman suckling an infant. Father and child were laughing, while the mother smiled.
The stranger stayed for a moment thoughtfully contemplating this pleasant scene. Only he could have said what he was thinking. He may well have reflected that so happy a household might also be hospitable, and that where there was so much gaiety there might also be a little charity.
He tapped very gently on the window-pane but was not heard.
He tapped a second time and heard the wife say to her husband: ‘I think there’s someone knocking.’
‘It’s nothing,’ said the man.
He tapped a third time, and now the husband rose, picked up the lamp and opened the door.
He was a tall man, part peasant, part craftsman, wearing a large leather apron attached over his left shoulder, in the bulge of which were a hammer, an old handkerchief, a powder-horn, and a variety of other objects, held in place by his belt, so that it constituted a loose pocket. He carried his head high, and his open shirt-front disclosed a powerful, untanned neck. He had thick eyebrows, bushy black side-whiskers, prominent eyes and, above all, that air of being in his own place which cannot be described in words.
‘Forgive me, Monsieur,’ said the stranger. ‘If I pay you, will you give me a plate of soup and allow me to sleep in the shed in your garden? Will you do this, Monsieur? If I pay?’
‘Who are you?’ asked the master of the house.
‘I have come from Puy-Moisson. I’ve been walking all day. Can you do this for me? If I pay?’
‘I wouldn’t refuse shelter to any decent man who can pay. But why don’t you go to an inn?’
‘There are no rooms.’
‘What? But this isn’t market-day. Have you tried Labarre?’
‘Yes, I went there.’
‘Well?’
The stranger said awkwardly: ‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t have me.’
‘What about the other place – Rue de Chauffaut?’
The stranger’s embarrassment increased. He muttered: ‘He wouldn’t take me in either.’
A look of mistrust appeared on the peasant-face. The man’s gaze travelled slowly over the stranger and suddenly he exclaimed with a sort of shudder: ‘Are you the man – ?’
After a final glance he stepped rapidly backward, set the lamp on the table and took his gun down from the wall. At the words, ‘Are you the man –?’, the woman had gathered the two children into her arms and now stood behind her husband, her bosom uncovered, staring with horrified eyes at the stranger while she murmured in the patois of the hill-country, ‘Tsomaraude, brigand’.
All this happened in less time than it takes to tell. After examining the stranger for a moment as though he were some kind of wild beast the master of the house returned to the door, gun in hand, and said:
‘Clear out!’
‘I beseech you,’ said the stranger. ‘A glass of water.’
‘A bullet’s what you’ll get,’ said the man.
He slammed the door and sounds of the shooting of bolts, the closing of shutters and the clang of an iron bar falling into its slot could be heard from outside.
Night was closing in and the cold alpine wind was blowing. By the last gleam of daylight the stranger saw, in one of the gardens flanking the lane, a sort of hut which looked as though it had been made of turfs. Clambering resolutely over a low wooden fence he went to examine it. It had a very low, narrow doorway and seemed to be one of those temporary shelters which road-workers put up. This was what he assumed it to be.
He was cold and famished. Hunger he was resigned to, but here at least was some protection against the cold. Places of this sort were not generally occupied at night. Lying flat on his stomach he wriggled inside. It was warm, and there was a bedding of straw. For a moment he lay motionless, too exhausted to move. Then, finding his knapsack uncomfortable, and since in any case it would serve him as a pillow, he began to unbuckle its straps. At this moment he heard a fierce sound of growling and, looking up, saw the head of a large bull-mastiff outlined against the faint light beyond the entrance.
The hut was a dog-kennel.
The man was himself vigorous and formidable. Grasping his stick and using the knapsack as a shield he fought his way out, not without further damage to his tattered clothes. He beat a retreat with his stick outthrust in the defensive posture known to fencers as la rose couverte. When at length, and not without difficulty, he had got back over the fence and found himself again in the lane, alone and shelterless, driven out of a dog-kennel, he sank rather than seated himself on a stone by the roadside, and it seems that a passerby heard him cry aloud:
‘I’m not even a dog!’
Presently he got up and walked on, leaving the town behind, hoping to find a tree or hayrick which would serve him for the night. He walked for some time with his head bowed, but eventually, when he felt himself to be remote from all human habitation, he paused to look about him. He was in a field and before him was a hillock covered with the stubble of the recent harvest, so that it looked like a shaven head.
The horizon was very dark, not only with the darkness of night but also with low cloud which seemed to emanate from the hillock itself and, rising, to fill the sky. At the same time, since the moon was not yet risen and there was still a last, faint glimmer of twilight, the clouds formed a pallid vault reflecting this light back to earth.
The earth was thus more brightly illumined than the heavens, producing a strangely sinister effect, and the sparse outline of the hillock loomed mistily and bleakly against a shadowed horizon. The whole scene was ugly, mean, desolate, and drab. There was no object in the field or on the hillock except a single misshapen tree rustling its branches a few yards from where the outcast stood.
Clearly he was a man largely lacking in those finer sensibilities which cause the spirit to respond to the mysteries of nature; nevertheless that prospect of sky and plain, the hillock and the tree, was so profoundly desolating that after standing a few moments in motionless contemplation he turned abruptly away. There are times when nature seems hostile.
He went back to Digne, of which the gates were now shut. In 1815 Digne was still enclosed by the walls and square towers which had sustained sieges during the wars of religion, although these have since been demolished. Passing through a breach in the ramparts he re-entered the town.
The time was about eight. Being unfamiliar with the streets he resumed his haphazard wanderings, passing by the Prefecture and the Seminary. As he crossed the cathedral square he shook his fist at the church.
There is a printing works at one corner of the square. It was here that the proclamations of the Emperor and the Imperial Guard to the army, brought from Elba and dictated by Napoleon himself, were first printed. Exhausted and with no further hope the outcast stretched himself on a stone bench by the doorway of this establishment.
An elderly lady who came out of the cathedral at this moment saw him lying there and asked, ‘What are you doing?’
He answered roughly and angrily:
‘My good woman, you can see what I’m doing. I’m sleeping here.’
The good woman, who indeed merited the designation, was the Marquise de R—.
‘On this bench?’ she asked.
‘I’ve slept for nineteen years on a wooden mattress,’ the man said. ‘Now it’s stone.’
‘Were you a soldier?’
‘Yes – a soldier.’
‘Why don’t you go to an inn?’
‘Because I haven’t any money.’
‘Alas,’ said Madame de R—, ‘I have only four sous in my purse.’
‘That’s better than nothing.’
The man took the four sous and Madame de R— said:
‘It’s not enough to pay for lodging at an inn. But have you tried everything? You can’t possibly spend the night here. You must be cold and hungry. Someone would surely take you in out of charity.’
‘I’ve knocked at every door.’
‘You really mean –?’
‘I’ve been turned away everywhere.’
The lady touched his arm and pointed across the square to a small house beside the bishop’s palace.
‘Have you really knocked at every door?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you knocked at that one?’
‘No.’
‘Then do.’
That evening the Bishop of Digne, after returning from his customary walk through the town, had stayed late in his own room. He was busy with a large work on Christian Duty which, alas, was never completed. The book, which was to be a careful survey of all that the learned Fathers and Doctors have said upon this weighty matter, was to be divided in two parts, treating first the duties of the community as a whole and secondly of the duties of the individual according to the category to which he belonged. The duties of the community are major duties and St Matthew has resolved them into four: duty to God, duty to self, duty to one’s neighbour, duty to all living creatures. As for the more particular duties, the bishop had found these defined and prescribed elsewhere. The duties of monarchs and their subjects were dealt with in the Epistle to the Romans; those of magistrates, wives, mothers, and young men by St Peter; those of husbands, fathers, children, and servants in the Epistle to the Ephesians; those of the Faithful in the Epistle to the Hebrews and those of virgins in the Epistle to the Corinthians. He was engaged in the laborious task of reassembling these prescriptions in a harmonious whole for the good of all men’s souls.
At eight o’clock that evening he was still at work, writing rather uncomfortably on small slips of paper with a large volume open on his knees, when Mme Magloire entered as usual to get the silver cutlery out of the cupboard by the bed. A few minutes later the bishop, suspecting that the table was laid and that his sister might be waiting, closed his book and went into the dining-room. It was a rectangular room with a fireplace, a door giving directly on to the street, as we have said, and a window opening on to the garden.
Mme Magloire had just finished laying the table and was chatting with Mlle Baptistine before serving the meal. A lamp stood on the table, which was near the hearth where a fire was burning. The two women, both over sixty, may readily be pictured – Mme Magloire short, plump, and lively; Mlle Baptistine mild, slender, and fragile, a little taller than her brother, clad in a dress of the plum-coloured silk that had been fashionable in 1806, the year she had bought it in Paris, and which she had been wearing ever since. To borrow one of those popular expressions which have the merit that they say more in a word than can be achieved by a page of writing, Mme Magloire had the look of a peasant and Mlle Baptistine that of a lady. Mme Magloire wore a white cap with piping, a small gold cross at her neck (the only article of feminine jewellery in the house), a very white kerchief emerging from her dress of black homespun with its wide, short sleeves, which was tied at the waist with a green ribbon, and a stomacher of the same material fixed with two pins in front. On her feet she wore thick shoes and yellow stockings of the kind worn by the women of Marseilles. Mlle Baptistine’s dress was cut in the 1806 pattern, high and narrow-waisted, with puffed shoulders, tabs, and buttons. She hid her grey hair under a curled peruke of the kind called à l’enfant. Mme Magloire had a look of bright intelligence and warmth of heart; the uneven corners of her mouth, with its upper lip thicker than the lower, gave an impression of imperious obstinacy. While the bishop remained silent she would address him with a forthright mingling of respect and familiarity, but directly he spoke she lapsed, like her mistress, into mute obedience. Mlle Baptistine talked very little, being content to obey and acquiesce. Even as a girl she had not been pretty, with her large, overprominent blue eyes and her long, pinched nose. She had been predestined to meekness, but faith, hope and charity, those virtues that enrich the soul, had raised meekness to saintliness. Nature had made her a lamb, religion had made her an angel of goodness.
Mlle Baptistine was later to tell the story of that night’s events so often that there are persons still living who can recall its every detail. At the moment when the bishop entered the dining-room Mme Magloire was talking with some vehemence to her mistress about a matter which constantly occupied her mind and with which her master was well acquainted, namely, the fastening of the front door. It seemed that while she had been out shopping for the evening meal she had heard rumours. There was talk of a stranger in the town, a vagabond of forbidding aspect who must still be lurking in the streets, which made it inadvisable for anyone to be out late that night; the more so since the police service was not all it should be owing to bad blood between the prefect and the mayor, each of whom would be glad to make trouble for the other. In short the prudent citizen would do well to see after his own safety by shuttering and barricading his house and making sure that his front door was securely locked.
Mme Magloire laid particular stress on those last words, but the bishop, whose own room was rather cold, had sat down to warm himself by the fire and paid no attention. Accordingly she repeated them, and Mlle Baptistine, wishing to support her without vexing her brother, said cautiously:
‘Brother, did you hear what Mme Magloire said?’
‘Only vaguely,’ said the bishop. He half turned with his hands on his knees and smiled at the old servant with the glow of firelight on his friendly, cheerful face. ‘Well now, what is it? Do I understand that we are in some grave danger?’
Mme Magloire told the story again, instinctively elaborating it. The man was a gipsy, a ne’er-do-well, a dangerous beggar. He had tried to get a lodging with Jacquin Labarre, who had turned him away. He had arrived by way of the Boulevard Gassendi and had been seen wandering about the streets in the mist, a man with a knapsack and a terrible look on his face.
‘Really?’ said the bishop.
Encouraged by this show of interest, which suggested that the bishop shared something of her alarm, Mme Magloire continued triumphantly:
‘Yes, Monseigneur, that kind of man. Something dreadful will happen tonight, everyone says so. When you think of the state of the police, and a town buried in the mountains like this with not a single lantern in the streets so that it’s black as pitch when you go out … Well, what I say, and Mademoiselle agrees with me –’
‘I am saying nothing,’ murmured Mademoiselle. ‘Whatever my brother does is right.’
Mme Magloire ignored the interruption.
‘What we both say is that this house is not safe and that, if Monseigneur permits, I should go round to Paulin Musebois, the locksmith, and ask him to put back the bolts on the front door. We have them here, it wouldn’t take him a minute. I say the door should be bolted, even if it’s only for tonight, and anyway it’s a shocking thing for the door to be simply on the latch so that any stranger can walk in, to say nothing of Monseigneur’s habit of always inviting people in, even at midnight, gracious Heaven, they don’t even need to ask, and when you think –’
At this moment there was a heavy knock on the door.
‘Come in,’ said the bishop.
The door opened. It was flung widely open, as though in response to a vigorous and determined thrust. A man entered.
We know the man already. He stepped across the threshold and then stood motionless with the door still open behind him. His knapsack hung from his shoulder and his stick was in his hand. The firelight falling on his face disclosed an expression of exhaustion, desperation, and brutish defiance. He was an ugly and terrifying spectacle.
Mme Magloire was too startled even to exclaim. She stood trembling and open-mouthed. Mlle Baptistine half rose in alarm but then, as she turned towards her brother, her face recovered its customary tranquillity.
The bishop was calmly regarding the stranger. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could do so the man, leaning on his stick with both hands and gazing round at the three elderly people, said in a harsh voice:
‘Look. My name is Jean Valjean. I’m a convict on parole. I’ve done nineteen years in prison. They let me out four days ago and I’m on my way to Pontarlier. I’ve walked from Toulon in four days and today I covered a dozen leagues [about thirty miles]. When I reached this place I went to an inn and they turned me out because of my yellow ticket-of-leave which I’d shown at the Mairie as I’m obliged to do. I tried another inn and they told me to clear out. Nobody wants me anywhere. I tried the prison and the doorkeeper wouldn’t open. I crawled into a dog-kennel and the dog bit me and drove me out just as if he were a man and knew who I was. I thought I’d sleep in a field under the stars, but there weren’t any stars and it looked as though it was going to rain, and no God to stop it raining, so I came back here hoping to find a doorway to sleep in. I lay down on a bench in the square outside and a good woman pointed to your door and told me to knock on it. So I’ve knocked. What is this place? Is it an inn? I’ve got money. I’ve got one hundred and nine francs and fifteen sous, the money I earned by nineteen years’ work in prison. I’m ready to pay, I don’t care how much, I’ve got the money. I’m very tired, twelve leagues on foot, and I’m hungry. Will you let me stay?’
‘Mme Magloire,’ said the bishop, ‘will you please lay another place.’
The man moved nearer to the light of the table-lamp, seeming not to understand.
‘It’s not like that,’ he said. ‘Weren’t you listening? I’m a convict, a felon, I’ve served in the galleys.’ He pulled a sheet of yellow paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. ‘This is my ticket-of-leave – yellow, as you see. That’s why everybody turns me away. Do you want to read it? I can read. There were classes in prison for anyone who wanted to learn. You can see what it says – “Jean Valjean, released convict, born in –” not that that matters “– served nineteen years, five years for robbery with violence, fourteen years for four attempts to escape – a very dangerous man.” So there you are. Everybody kicks me out. Will you take me in? Is this an inn? Can you give me food and a bed for the night? Have you a stable?’
‘Mme Magloire,’ said the bishop, ‘you must put clean sheets on the bed in the alcove.’
We have already described the absolute obedience of the two women. Mme Magloire went off without a word.
The bishop turned to the man.
‘Sit down and warm yourself, Monsieur. Supper will very soon be ready, and the bed can be made up while you’re having a meal.’
And now the man had really understood. His face, which had been so hard and sombre, was suddenly and remarkably transformed by an expression of amazement, incredulity and pleasure. He began to babble like a child.
‘You really mean it? You’ll let me stay? A convict – and you aren’t turning me out! You called me “Monsieur”. “Clear off, you dog,” is what they mostly say. I thought you’d be bound to send me away, that’s why I told you at once who I was. I’m grateful to the good lady who sent me here. Supper and a bed, with a mattress and sheets! It’s nineteen years since I slept in a bed. Well, I’ve got the money, I’m ready to pay. May I ask your name, sir? I’ll pay whatever you ask. You’re a good man. You are an innkeeper, aren’t you?’
‘I’m a priest,’ said the bishop, ‘and this is where I live.’
‘A priest! But a good priest. So you won’t ask for payment. I suppose you’re the curé of this great church. But of course! I’m stupid. I hadn’t noticed your cap.’
He had put his knapsack and stick in a corner while he was speaking, and after returning the yellow document to his pocket he sat down. Mlle Baptistine was looking kindly at him.
‘You’re human, Monsieur le curé,’ he went on. ‘You don’t despise people. A good priest is a fine thing. So I don’t need to pay anything?’
‘No,’ said the bishop, ‘keep your money. How much did you say – a hundred and nine francs?’
‘And fifteen sous.’
‘And how long did it take you to earn it?’
‘Nineteen years.’
‘Nineteen years!’ The bishop sighed profoundly.
‘I’ve still got it all,’ the man said. ‘All I’ve spent in these four days is twenty-five sous I earned by helping to unload some carts in Grasse. As you’re a priest I may tell you that we had an almoner in the prison. And once I saw a bishop – a Monseigneur, as they say. He was from Marseilles. A bishop’s a priest who’s higher than the other priests, not that I’ve any need to tell you that, but for us it’s all so strange, for men like me. He said mass at an altar in the prison yard and he had a sort of pointed hat on his head, gold, it glittered in the sun at midday. We were drawn up in ranks on three sides of the yard, with the guns pointing at us, fuses lighted. We couldn’t see him very well. He talked, but he was too far off and we couldn’t hear. That’s what a bishop’s like.’
The bishop had risen while he was speaking to shut the door, which had remained wide open. Mme Magloire came back into the room with the additional cutlery.
‘Put them as near as possible to the fire, Mme Magloire,’ the bishop said. He turned to his guest. ‘The night wind is raw in the Alps. You must be cold, Monsieur.’
Each time he uttered the word ‘Monsieur’ in his mild, companionable voice the man’s face lighted up. The courtesy, to the exconvict, was like fresh water to a shipwrecked man. Ignominy thirsts for respect.
‘This lamp doesn’t give much light,’ the bishop said.
Perceiving what he had in mind, Mme Magloire fetched the two silver candlesticks from his bedroom mantelpiece, lit them and set them on the table.
‘Monsieur le curé,’ said the man, ‘you are very good. You don’t despise me. You have taken me in and lighted your candles for me. But I have not concealed from you where I come from and what I am.’
The bishop, seated at his side, laid a hand gently on his arm.
‘You need have told me nothing. This house is not mine but Christ’s. It does not ask a man his name but whether he is in need. You are in trouble, you are hungry and thirsty, and so you are welcome. You need not thank me for receiving you in my house. No one is at home here except those seeking shelter. Let me assure you, passer-by though you are, that this is more your home than mine. Everything in it is yours. Why should I ask your name? In any case I knew it before you told me.’
The man looked up with startled eyes. ‘You know my name?’
‘Of course,’ said the bishop. ‘Your name is brother.’
‘Monsieur le curé,’ the man cried, ‘I was famished when I came in here. Now I scarcely know what I feel. Everything has changed.’
The bishop was regarding him. ‘You have suffered a great deal,’ he said.
‘Well, yes – the red smock, the ball-and-chain, a plank to sleep on, heat, cold and hard labour, the galleys and the lash. The double-chain for a trifle, solitary for a single word. Chained even when you’re sick in bed. And the dogs – well, they’re better off than we were. Nineteen years of it. I’m forty-six. And now a yellow ticket. That’s the story.’
‘Yes. You have come from an unhappy place. But listen. There is more rejoicing in Heaven over the tears of one sinner who repents than over the white robes of a hundred who are virtuous. If you leave your place of suffering with hatred in your heart, and anger against men, you will be deserving of our pity; but if you leave with goodwill, in gentleness and peace, you will have risen above any of us.’
Mme Magloire had meanwhile dished up the meal, which consisted of a broth of water, oil, bread and salt with some scraps of bacon and mutton, figs, a fresh cheese, and a large loaf of rye bread. She had taken it upon herself to supplement the bishop’s table-wine with a bottle of old wine from Mauves.
The bishop had recovered the cheerful expression of a man who is hospitable by nature. ‘Supper is served,’ he said gaily, and, as his custom was, he seated the guest at his right hand while Mlle Baptistine, naturally and unassumingly, took her place on his left.
The bishop said grace and himself served the broth. The man began to eat hungrily. But suddenly the bishop said:
‘There seems to be something lacking on this table.’
Mme Magloire had, in fact, only laid places for three. But it was the custom of the house, when there was a guest, to set out the full set of silver cutlery for six persons, an innocent and childlike display of elegance, in that simple and austere household, which graced its poverty with dignity.
Again reading his thought Mme Magloire went out without speaking, and a minute later the rest of the set, laid for three additional guests, gleamed on the white tablecloth.
To convey some notion of what took place during that meal we cannot do better than quote part of a letter written by Mlle Baptistine to Mme de Boischevron in which she gives a detailed and artless account of the conversation between the bishop and the exconvict.
… The man at first paid no attention to anyone. He ate as though he were starving. But after the broth he said:
‘Monsieur le curé, all this is too good for me, but let me tell you that the waggoners, who would not let me share, their meal, eat better than you.’
I may confess that this remark rather shocked me. But my brother replied:
‘Their work is more tiring than mine.’
‘No,’ said the man. ‘They have more money. I can see that you are poor. Perhaps you are not even a curé. Are you a curé? If God were just you would be that at least.’
‘God is more than just,’ said my brother, and he went on after a pause. ‘I understand, Monsieur Jean Valjean, that you are on your way to Pontarlier.’
‘On a route which I am under orders to follow.’ This, I think, is what the man said. He continued: ‘I have to start tomorrow at daybreak. It’s a hard journey. The nights may be cold but the days are hot.’
‘You are going to a good part of the country,’ my brother said. ‘My family was ruined in the Revolution and for a time I took refuge in the Franche-Comté where I got my living by manual labour. I was willing and I had no difficulty in finding work. There is plenty to be had. There are paper-mills, distilleries, oil-refineries, clockmakers, steel and copper mills, and at least twenty iron foundries, of which four, at Lods, Chatillon, Audincourt, and Beure, are very large.’
I think those are the places my brother named. He then turned to me and said:
‘My dear, have we not relatives in the region?’
‘We used to have,’ I replied. ‘Among others there was Monsieur de Lucenet, who was Captain of the Gates at Pontarlier under the ancien régime.’
‘But we had no relatives left in ’93,’ said my brother. ‘We had only our hands. I worked. In the region of Pontarlier, where you are going, Monsieur Valjean, there is a charming patriarchal industry consisting of the cheese-farms which they call fruitières.’
While encouraging the man to go on eating my brother described these Pontarlier fruitières to him in great detail. There are two kinds, those known as the grosses granges, the property of rich owners, with a herd of forty or fifty cows, which produce seven or eight thousand cheeses in a summer, and the fruitières d’associations formed by groups of the poorer peasants in the middle hills who share the cows and their produce and receive payment from a cheese-maker who is known as the grurin. The grurin takes three deliveries of milk a day and enters the quantities in a double register. Cheese-making begins towards the end of April, and the peasants take their cows up to the hill-pastures about the middle of June.
The man was reviving as he ate, and my brother encouraged him to drink the good Mauves wine which he himself does not drink because he says it costs too much. He told him about the cheese-making in the light and easy way with which you are familiar, breaking off occasionally to bring me into the conversation. He referred more than once to the excellent standing of the grurin as though he wished to convey to the man, without presuming directly to advise him, that this was a field of employment which he might do well to enter. One thing particularly struck me. I have told you the kind of man this was. Well, throughout the meal, and indeed throughout the evening, except for those few words at the beginning, my brother said nothing to remind him of what he was, nor did he tell him who he himself was. Clearly this was a possible occasion for a little sermonizing and for the bishop to make himself known to the malefactor in order to impress him. Another man, having him at his mercy, might have seized the opportunity to fortify his soul as well as his body with words of reproof and moral exhortation, or of sympathy mingled with the hope that he would mend his ways in the future. But my brother did not so much as ask the man where he was born. He did not ask his story. For the story must have included some account of his crimes and my brother clearly wished to avoid all reference to these. To the point, indeed, that when he was talking about the hill-people of Pontarlier and ‘their pleasant labours high under heaven’ and their contentment because they were innocent, he broke off abruptly as though fearing that he might say something to offend the man. Thinking it over afterwards, I believe I know what was in my brother’s mind. He must have reflected that the man, this Jean Valjean, was sufficiently oppressed already with the burden of his wretchedness, and that it was better to distract his thoughts and make him feel, if only for a little while, that he was a man like any other. Was not this true charity? Is there not true evangelism in the delicacy which refrains from preaching and moralizing? To avoid probing an open wound, is not that the truest sympathy? This, I believe, was my brother’s inmost thought. But I can also affirm that if this was his thought he gave no sign of it, even to me. From start to finish he was his ordinary self, and he dined with Jean Valjean precisely as he would have done with the provost or the curé of the parish.
Near the end of the meal, when we were at dessert, there was a knock at the door. It was Mme Gerbaud with her child in her arms. My brother kissed the child on the forehead and borrowed fifteen sous which I had handy and gave them to her. Valjean paid little attention to this. He had fallen silent and was looking very tired. When the old woman had left, my brother said grace, and then, turning to Valjean, he said, ‘I’m sure you’re ready for bed.’ Mme Magloire quickly cleared the table. I realized that it was time for us to withdraw and leave the man to sleep, and we both went upstairs. But I sent Mme Magloire down a moment later with a goatskin rug from the Black Forest which I have in my room. The nights are bitterly cold and although it is old, more’s the pity, and the hair is very worn, it would help to warm his bed. My brother bought it in Germany, at Tottlingen, near the source of the Danube, and also the little ivory-handled knife which I use at table.
Mme Magloire came back almost at once and we said our prayers in the room where we hang the washing to dry. Then each of us went to her own room without a word.
Having bidden his sister good night Monseigneur Bienvenu picked up one of the two silver candlesticks and handed the other to his guest, saying, ‘I will show you to your room, Monsieur.’ The man followed him.
As we have seen, the arrangement of the rooms was such that to reach the oratory with its alcove, or to leave it, one had to go through the bishop’s bedroom. They did so while Mme Magloire was in the act of replacing the silver in the cupboard by the bed, this being invariably the last thing she did before retiring.
The bishop showed his guest into the alcove, where the bed was newly made. The man put the candle on a small table.
‘Sleep well,’ said the bishop. ‘Before you leave tomorrow you must have a bowl of warm milk from our cows.’
‘Thank you, Monsieur l’abbé,’ the man said.
And then, having uttered those peaceable words, suddenly and without warning he assumed a posture that would have horrified the two women had they been there to witness it. It is hard, even now, to say what impulse seized him at that moment. Did he intend to convey a warning or a threat, or was it simply a sort of instinctive movement incomprehensible even to himself? He swung round upon his elderly host, folded his arms, glared at him, and harshly exclaimed:
‘This is wonderful! You’re putting me to sleep in a bed next to your own.’ He broke off to laugh, and there was a monstrous quality in his laughter. ‘Have you thought what you’re doing? How do you know I have never murdered anyone?’
The bishop replied quietly: ‘That is God’s affair.’
Then with his lips moving as though in prayer, or as though he were speaking to himself, he gravely raised his right hand, the first two fingers extended, and blessed the man, who did not bow his head in response; after which he turned and, without looking back, went to his own room.
When the alcove was occupied, a large curtain of serge was drawn across the oratory to hide the altar. The bishop knelt for a moment in front of this and said a short prayer.
A minute later he was in his garden, strolling and meditating, his mind and spirit absorbed in the contemplation of those mysteries which God reveals at night to eyes that remain open.
As for the man, he was so utterly exhausted that he could not even enjoy the luxury of clean white sheets. After blowing out the candle with his nostril, as convicts do, he stretched himself fully clad on the bed and sank instantly into a profound slumber.
Midnight was striking when the bishop returned to his room, and a few minutes later all the house was asleep.
In the small hours Jean Valjean awoke.
Jean Valjean came from a very poor peasant family in Brie. As a child he had not learnt to read. When he was old enough he had gone to work as a tree-pruner at Faverolles. His mother’s name was Jeanne Mathieu and his father was Jean Valjean or Vlajean, the latter being probably a nickname, a contraction of ‘voilà Jean’.
The boy was thoughtful without being melancholy, which is a characteristic of warm-hearted natures. In general he tended to be immature and rather unimpressive, at least in his outward aspect. He had lost both his parents when he was still very young. His mother had died of milk-fever, and his father, who was also a pruner, had been killed by a fall from a tree. His only living relative was a widowed sister older than himself who had seven children, boys and girls. She had housed and fed him while her husband was still alive, but the husband had died when the oldest child was eight and the youngest only one. Jean Valjean, who was then just twenty-four, had stepped into the breach and supported the sister who had cared for him. It had happened quite naturally, as a matter of plain duty, but with a certain surliness on the part of Valjean. All his youth had been spent in hard and ill-paid labour. He was never known to have a sweetheart, having had no time to fall in love.
He came home tired after work and ate his supper in silence. His sister, Mother Jeanne, would often take the best bits out of his bowl, the scrap of meat or whatever it might be, to give to one of the children. Seated with his head bowed and the long hair hiding his eyes, he would take no notice of this but would go on eating as though nothing had happened. Near the cottage where they lived, across the lane, was a farmhouse. The Valjean children, always ravenous, would borrow a jug of milk in their mother’s name from the farmer’s wife and drink it behind a hedge, snatching the jug from each other so greedily that they spilt milk on their clothes. Had their mother known she would have whipped them. But Valjean always paid, in his offhand, surly fashion, and they went unpunished.
His work as a tree-pruner brought him twenty-four sous a day during the season and at other times he worked as a harvester, cattleman, or at any other form of casual labour. He did what he could, and his sister also worked, but the seven children were a great burden. They were a sad little group, engulfed in poverty and always on the verge of destitution. And then came a particularly hard winter. Jean was out of work and there was no food in the house. Literally no bread – and seven children!
One Sunday night when Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Place de l’Église in Faverolles, was getting ready for bed, he heard a sound of shattered glass from his barred shop-window. He reached the spot in time to see an arm thrust through a hole in the pane. The hand grasped a loaf and the thief made off at a run. Isabeau chased and caught him. He had thrown away the loaf, but his arm was bleeding. The thief was Jean Valjean.
This was in the year 1795. Valjean was tried in the local court for housebreaking and robbery. He possessed a shotgun which he used for other than legitimate purposes – he was something of a poacher – and this told against him. There is a legitimate prejudice against poachers who, like smugglers, are not far removed from brigandage. Nevertheless it may be remarked in passing that there is a wide gulf between men of this kind and the murderous criminals in the towns. The poacher works in the woods, and the smuggler in the mountains or on the sea. The towns make men ferocious because they make them corrupt. Mountains, sea, and forest make men reckless. They stir the wildness of men’s nature, but do not necessarily destroy what is human.
Jean Valjean was found guilty. The Penal Code was explicit. There are terrible occasions in our civilization, those when the Law decrees the wrecking of a human life. It is a fateful moment when society draws back its skirts and consigns a sentient being to irrevocable abandonment. Jean Valjean was sentenced to five years hard labour.
On 22 April 1796, the victory of Montenotte was proclaimed in Paris, a victory won by the general commanding the army in Italy, referred to as Buona-Parte in the message addressed by the Directory to the Five Hundred, dated 2 Florial, Year IV. On the same day a large chain-gang was assembled at Bicêtre, of which Jean Valjean was one. A former turnkey at the prison, now aged nearly ninety, perfectly recalls the unhappy wretch who was chained at the end of the fourth row in the north corner of the prison yard. He was seated with the rest on the ground and seemed to understand nothing about his situation except that it was hideous. No doubt there was also a vague notion in his ignorant and untutored peasant mind that it was excessive. While heavy hammer-blows riveted the iron collar round his neck, he wept so bitterly that he could not speak except to mumble from time to time, ‘I was a tree-pruner in Faverolles.’ Still sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it in stages as though he were laying it upon seven heads of unequal height, a gesture designed to indicate that what he had done had been for the sake of seven children.
He was taken to Toulon, where he arrived, still chained by the neck, after a journey of twenty-seven days in a cart. Here he was clad in the red smock and everything that had been his life was blotted out, even to his name. He was no longer Jean Valjean, but No. 24601. As to what became of his sister and children, who knew or cared? What becomes of the leaves of a tree, sawed down at the root?
It is an old story. Those unhappy beings, God’s creatures, left without support, guidance, or shelter, were scattered no one knows where. Each presumably went its own way, to become lost in that cold murk that envelops solitary destinies, the distressful shadows wherein disappear so many unfortunates in the sombre progress of mankind. They left the district. The church-tower of what had been their village, the hedgerows of what had been their countryside, forgot them; and after a few years’ imprisonment even Jean Valjean forgot them. What had been an open wound was covered by a scar. That is all. During all the time he was in Toulon he only once had news of his sister. It was, I think, towards the end of his fourth year. I do not know how the news reached him. Someone who had known them in Faverolles had seen her. She was living in Paris, in a poor street near Saint-Sulpice, with only one of her children, the youngest, a little boy. Where were the other six? Perhaps she herself did not know. She was working as a folder and stitcher for a printer in the Rue de Sabot. She had to be there at six in the morning, well before daybreak in winter. There was a school in the same house where she took her seven-year-old boy. But since she started work at six and the school did not open until seven the child had to wait for an hour in the open air of the courtyard – in winter an hour of darkness. He was not allowed into the printer’s shop because, they said, he got in the way. Passing workmen would see the poor little creature crouched half asleep on the cobbles, or huddled sleeping over his basket. On rainy days an old woman, the concierge, would take pity on him and let him into her den, which contained nothing but a truckle-bed, a spinning wheel, and two wooden chairs; and here the little boy would curl up in a corner, hugging the cat for warmth. At seven o’clock he went into school. This was what Jean Valjean learned, and the story brought a momentary blaze of light as though a window had been suddenly opened on the lives of those beings he had loved. Then it was closed again. He heard no more of them; he was destined never to see them again; and there will be no further mention of them in this tale.
Jean Valjean’s turn to escape came towards the end of that fourth year. His fellow-prisoners helped him as was customary. He got away, and for two days drifted in freedom through the countryside: if to be tracked is freedom, to be constantly on the alert, to tremble at every sound, to be frightened of everything, a smoking chimney, a passing man, a barking dog, a galloping horse, a striking clock; to be frightened of the daylight because one can see, and of the darkness because one cannot; to be frightened of the road, the pathway, and the thicket; to be afraid to sleep. On the evening of the second day he was caught. He had neither eaten nor slept for thirty-six hours. The tribunal added three years to his sentence, making eight in all. His second turn came in the sixth year and again he used it, but with even less success. His absence was discovered at roll-call. The alarm-gun was fired, and that night the watch found him in the dockyard hiding under the keel of a vessel under construction. He fought against them, and for the crimes of attempted escape and resisting arrest the Code prescribed the penalty of an additional five years, two in double chains. Thirteen years. His third turn came in the tenth year, and again he tried and failed. For this he got another three years, making sixteen. It was in the thirteenth year, I believe, that he made his last attempt. He was out for only four hours, but they cost him another three years. Nineteen years altogether. He was released in October 1815, after being imprisoned in 1796 for having broken a window-pane and stolen a loaf of bread.
A brief parenthesis. This is the second time that the present writer, in his study of the penal system and the damning of men’s souls by law, has found the theft of a loaf of bread to be the starting-point of the wrecking of a life. Claude Gueux stole a loaf, as did Jean Valjean. English statistics have established that in London hunger is the direct cause of four robberies out of five.
Jean Valjean had gone to imprisonment weeping and trembling; he emerged impassive. He had gone despairing; he emerged grim-faced.
What had taken place in this man’s soul?
We must try to answer the question. It is very necessary that society should look at these matters, since they are the work of society.
He was an untutored man, as we have said; but that is not to say that he was stupid. There was a spark of natural intelligence in him; and adversity, which sheds its own light, had fostered the light slowly dawning in his mind. Under the lash and in chains, on fatigue and in the solitary cell, under the burning Mediterranean sun and on the prisoner’s plank bed, he withdrew into his own conscience and reflected.
Constituting himself judge and jury, he began by trying his own case.
He admitted that he was not an innocent man unjustly punished. He had committed an excessive and blameworthy act. The loaf of bread might not have been refused him if he had asked for it, and in any event it would have been better to wait, either for charity or for work. The argument, ‘Can a man wait when he is half-starved’ was not unanswerable, for the fact is that very few people literally die of hunger. Man is so constituted that he can endure long periods of suffering, both moral and physical, without dying of it. He should have had patience, and this would have been better even for the children. To attempt to take society by the throat, vulnerable creature that he was, and to suppose that he could escape from poverty through theft, had been an act of folly. In any case, the road leading to infamy was a bad road of escape. He admitted all this – in short, that he had done wrong.
But then he asked questions.
Was he the only one at fault in this fateful business? Was it not a serious matter that a man willing to work should have been without work and without food? And, admitting the offence, had not the punishment been ferocious and outrageous? Was not the law more at fault in the penalty it inflicted than he had been in the crime he committed? Had not the scales of justice been over-weighted on the side of expiation? And did not this weighting of the scales, far from effacing the crime, produce a quite different result, namely, a reversal of the situation, substituting for the original crime the crime of oppression, making the criminal a victim and the law his debtor, transferring justice to the side of him who had offended against it? Did not the penalty, aggravated by his attempts to escape, become in the end a sort of assault by the stronger on the weaker, a crime committed by society against the individual and repeated daily for nineteen years?
He asked himself whether human society had the right to impose upon its members, on the one hand its mindless improvidence and, on the other hand, its merciless providence; to grind a poor man between the millstones of need and excess – need of work and excess of punishment. Was it not monstrous that society should treat in this fashion precisely those least favoured in the distribution of wealth, which is a matter of chance, and therefore those most needing indulgence?
He asked these questions and, having answered them, passed judgement on society.
He condemned it to his hatred. He held it responsible for what he was undergoing and resolved that, if the chance occurred, he would not hesitate to call it to account. He concluded that there was no true balance between the wrong he had done and the wrong that was inflicted upon him, and that although his punishment might not be technically an injustice it was beyond question an iniquity.
Anger may be ill-considered and absurd; we may be mistakenly angered; but only when there is some deep-seated reason are we outraged. Jean Valjean was outraged.
Moreover society as a whole had done him nothing but injury. He had seen nothing of it but the sour face which it calls justice and shows only to those it castigates. Men had touched him only to hurt him; his only contact with them had been through blows. From the time of his childhood, and except for his mother and sister, he had never encountered a friendly word or a kindly look. During the years of suffering he reached the conclusion that life was a war in which he was one of the defeated. Hatred was his only weapon, and he resolved to sharpen it in prison and carry it with him when he left.
There was in Toulon a school conducted by monks which offered elementary instruction to those unfortunates who were willing to accept it. Valjean was among them. He went there when he was forty and learned to read, write, and calculate, with the feeling that to improve his mind was to fortify his hatred. There are circumstances in which education and enlightenment can become an extension of evil.
The sad fact must be recorded that having condemned society as the cause of his misfortune, he took it upon himself to pass judgement on the Providence which had created society, and this, too, he condemned. Thus during those nineteen years of torture and enslavement his spirit both grew and shrank. Light entered on one side and darkness on the other.
As we have seen, he was not bad by nature; he had been still virtuous when he was sent to prison. There he learned to condemn society and felt himself becoming evil; he condemned Providence and knew that he became impious.
It is difficult at this point not to pause for a moment to reflect.
Can human nature be ever wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof? Is there not in every human soul, and was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean, an essential spark, an element of the divine, indestructible in this world and immortal in the next, which goodness can preserve, nourish, and fan into glorious flame, and which evil can never quite extinguish?
These are weighty and obscure questions, to the last of which any psychologist would probably have answered no, had he seen Jean Valjean in Toulon during a rest period seated with arms crossed over a capstan-bar, the end of his chain thrust into his pocket to stop it dragging, a brooding galley-slave, sombre, silent, and vengeful, an outcast of the laws glaring in anger at men, one of the damned of civilization looking accusingly at Heaven.
There can be little doubt, and we may not pretend otherwise, that the observant psychologist would have seen in him a case of incurable abasement, a sick man for whom he might feel pity but for whom he could propose no remedy. He would have averted his gaze from the spiritual abysses he discerned and, like Dante at the gate of hell, have expunged from that life the word which God’s finger writes on the brow of every man, the word Hope.
And what of Valjean himself? Was the spiritual state which we have depicted as plain to him as we have sought to make it to the reader? Had he any clear perception, after they were formed, or during their formation, of the elements of which his moral degradation was composed? Could a man so crude and untaught take any positive account of the process whereby, by gradual stages, his spirit had risen and sunk into those depths which through the years had come to constitute his moral horizon? We cannot venture to say so, and in fact we do not believe it. He was too ignorant to be lucid in his thoughts, even after so much hardship. There were times when he could not be sure of his own feelings. He lived in shadow, suffered in shadow, hated the shadows and may be said to have hated himself. He lived in darkness fumbling like a blind man, a man in a dream. Only occasionally was he overtaken by a burst of furious rage, rising within him or provoked from without, that was an overflow of suffering, a swift, searing flame illuminating all his soul and shedding its ugly light on everything that lay behind him and ahead, the chasms and sombre vistas of his destiny.
But these flashes passed, the darkness closed in again – and where was he? He did not know.
It is characteristic of this form of punishment, inspired by all that is pitiless, that is to say brutalizing, that gradually, by a process of mindless erosion, it turns a man into an animal, sometimes a ferocious one. Jean Valjean’s repeated and obstinate efforts to escape are evidence of the effect of this legal chastisement on the human spirit. He would have made further hopeless attempts whenever the chance offered, without giving a thought to the consequences or to past experience. Like a caged wolf, he dashed madly for the door whenever he found it open. Instinct prompted him to run where reason would have bidden him stay: in the face of that overwhelming impulse, reason vanished. It was the animal that acted, and the added penalties inflicted on him when he was recaptured served only to increase its savagery.
A detail which we must not fail to mention is that in physical strength Jean Valjean far surpassed any other inmate of the prison. On fatigue duties, or hauling an anchor-chain or turning a capstan, he was worth four men. He could lift and carry enormous weights and on occasion did duty for the appliance known as a ‘jack’, in those days called an orgueil, from which the Rue Montorgueil, near the Paris halles, derives its name. Once when the balcony of the Toulon town-hall was being repaired, one of the admirable caryatids by Puget which support it came loose and was in danger of falling. Valjean, who was on the spot, propped it up with his shoulder until help arrived.
His dexterity was even greater than his strength. There are prisoners, obsessed with the thought of escape, eternally envious of the birds and the flies, who make a positive cult of the physical sciences, daily performing a mysterious ritual of exercises. The climbing of a sheer surface, where scarcely any hand or foothold was to be discerned, was to Valjean a pastime. Given the angle of a wall and applying the thrust of his back and legs, with elbows and heels gripping the rough surface of the stone, he could climb three storeys as though by magic; he had even reached the prison roof.
He spoke seldom and never smiled. It took some extreme emotion to wring from him, perhaps once or twice in a year, the sour convict-chuckle that is like the laughter of demons. The sight of him suggested that he was continually absorbed in the contemplation of something terrible.
And so he was. With the hazy perception of an unformed nature and an overborne intelligence, he was confusedly aware of something monstrous that oppressed him. Did he seek to look upward beyond the pallid half-light in which he crouched, it was to see, with mingled terror and rage, an endless structure rising above him, a dreadful piling-up of things, laws, prejudices, men and facts, whose shape he could not discern and whose mass appalled him, and which was nothing else than the huge pyramid that we call civilization. Here and there in the formless, swarming heap, near to him or at an inaccessible height, some detail would be thrown into sharp relief – the prison-warder with his truncheon, the gendarme with his sabre; above these the mitred bishop, and at the very top, like a sun, the Emperor radiantly crowned. Far from dispelling his own darkness, those distant splendours seemed only to intensify it. Life came and went above his head – laws, prejudices, facts, men and things – in the intricate and mysterious pattern God stamps on civilization, bearing down and crushing him with a placid cruelty and remorseless indifference. Men fallen into the nethermost pit of adversity, lost in that limbo where the eyes do not follow, those outcasts of the law feel upon their necks the whole weight of society, so formidable to the outsider, so terrifying to the underdog. It was in this situation that Jean Valjean pondered, and what could his thoughts be?
What could they be but the thoughts of a grain of corn ground between millstones, if it were capable of thinking? All these things, reality charged with fantasy and fantasy laden with reality, ended by creating in him a frame of mind scarcely to be expressed in words. At times he would pause in his prison labours to stand reflective, and his reason, at once more mature and more disturbed, would recoil in disbelief. The things that happened to him seemed inconceivable, the world around him grotesque. He would say to himself: this is a dream, and stare at the warder standing a few feet away as though he were seeing a ghost – until suddenly the ghost dealt him a blow.
He was almost unconscious of the natural world. It would be nearly true to say of Jean Valjean that for him the sun did not exist, or any summer day, or clear skies or April dawns. Heaven alone knows what sullied light filtered through to his soul.
To sum up this account of him, so far as it can be done in concrete terms, we may say that in nineteen years Jean Valjean, the harmless tree-pruner of Faverolles and the sinister galley-slave of Toulon, thanks to the way imprisonment had shaped him, had become capable of two kinds of ill-deed: first the heedless, unpremeditated act executed in a blind fury, as some sort of a reprisal for the wrongs he had suffered; and secondly, the deliberate and considered crime, justified in his mind by the thoughts inspired by those wrongs. His calculated thinking passed through the three successive stages of reason, resolve and obstinacy which are only possible to natures of a certain kind. His impulses were governed by resentment, bitterness and a profound sense of injury which might vent itself even upon good and innocent people, if any such came his way. The beginning and the end of all his thought was hatred of human laws: a hatred which, if some providential happening does not arrest its growth, may swell in time into a hatred of all society, all mankind, all created things, becoming a savage and obsessive desire to inflict harm on no matter what or whom.
It will be seen that the yellow ticket he carried had some warrant for describing Jean Valjean as ‘a very dangerous man’. Year by year, slowly but inexorably, his spirit had withered. Dry of heart and dry-eyed. During his nineteen years imprisonment he had not shed a tear.
Man overboard!
But the ship does not stop. The wind is blowing and the doom-laden vessel is set on a course from which it cannot depart. It sails on.
The man sinks and reappears, flings up his arms and shouts, but no one hears. The ship, heeling in the wind, is intent upon its business, and passengers and crew have lost sight of him, a pinpoint in the immensity of the sea.
He calls despairingly, gazing in anguish after the receding sail as, ghostlike, it fades from view. A short time ago he was on board, a member of the crew busy on deck with the rest, a living being with his share of air and sunlight. What has become of him now? He slipped and fell, and this is the end.
He is adrift in the monstrous waters with only their turbulence beneath him, hideously enclosed by wave-crests shredded by the wind, smothered as they break over his head, tumbled from one to another, rising and sinking into unfathomable darkness where he seems to become a part of the abyss, his mouth filled with bitter resentment at this treacherous ocean that is so resolved to destroy him, this monster toying with his death. To him the sea has become the embodiment of hatred.
But he goes on swimming, still struggles despairingly for life, his strength dwindling as he battles against the inexhaustible. Above him he can see only the bleak pallor of the clouds. He is the witness in his death-throes of the immeasurable dementia of the sea, and, tormented by this madness, he hears sounds unknown to man that seem to come from some dreadful place beyond the bounds of earth. There are birds flying amid the clouds as angels soar over the distresses of mankind, but what can they do for him? They sing as they glide and hover, while he gasps for life.
He is lost between the infinities of sea and sky, the one a tomb, the other a shroud. Darkness is falling. He has swum for hours until his strength is at an end and the ship with its company of men has long since passed from sight. Solitary in the huge gulf of twilight he twists and turns, feeling the waves of the unknowable close in upon him. And for the last time he calls, but not to man. Where is God?
He calls to anyone or anything – he calls and calls but there is no reply, nothing on the face of the waters, nothing in the heavens. He calls to the sea and spray, but they are deaf; he calls to the winds, but they are answerable only to infinity. Around him dusk and solitude, the heedless tumult of wild waters; within him terror and exhaustion; below him the descent into nothingness. No foothold. He pictures his body adrift in that limitless dark. The chill numbs him. His hands open and close, clutching at nothing. Wind and tumult and useless stars. What can he do? Despair ends in resignation, exhaustion chooses death, and so at length he gives up the struggle and his body sinks for ever.
Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?
When at the time of his leaving prison Jean Valjean heard the words, ‘You are free,’ the moment had seemed blinding and unbelievable, as though he were suddenly pierced by a shaft of light, the true light of living men. But this gleam swiftly faded. He had been dazzled by the idea of liberty. He had believed for an instant in a new life. He soon discovered the meaning of liberty when it is accompanied by a yellow ticket.
And with this came further disillusion. He had calculated that his savings during his imprisonment would amount to one hundred and seventy-one francs. It must be said in fairness that he had omitted to allow for Sundays and feast-days, days of enforced rest which reduced this total by about twenty-four francs. But there had been other deductions conforming to prison regulations, and the sum he received was one hundred and nine francs and fifteen sous.
He did not understand the reason for this and thought himself cheated – in plain language, robbed.
In Grasse, on the day after his release, he saw some men unloading bales of orange-blossom outside a scent-distillery. He volunteered his labour, and since the matter was urgent he was taken on. He was intelligent, strong, and adroit; he worked well and the foreman seemed content. While he was at work a passing gendarme noticed him and asked to see his papers. He had to show the yellow ticket, after which he went back to work. Earlier he had asked one of the other men the rate of pay for the day and had been told that it was thirty sous. In the evening, since he was obliged to move on next morning, he went to the foreman and asked for his wage. Without saying anything the man handed him twenty-five sous, and said when he protested, ‘That’s good enough for you.’ He again protested and the foreman looked hard at him and said, ‘Watch it or you’ll be back inside.’
Again he felt that he had been robbed. Society had robbed him wholesale of a part of his savings; now it was the turn of the individual to rob him in detail. Release, he discovered, was not deliverance. A man may leave prison, but he is still condemned.
This was what had happened to him in Grasse. We know of his reception in Digne.
Jean Valjean awoke as the cathedral clock was striking two.
What had awakened him was an over-comfortable bed. He had not slept in a bed for twenty years, and although he had not taken off his clothes, the sensation was too unfamiliar not to disturb his sleep. Nevertheless he had slept for over four hours and recovered from his exhaustion. He was not accustomed to long hours of rest.
He opened his eyes and peered into the darkness, then closed them hoping to fall asleep again. But after a day of various emotions, when many thoughts have oppressed the mind, we may fall once asleep but not a second time. Sleep comes more readily than it returns. This was the case with Valjean. He could not get to sleep again and lay thinking.
He was in a state of great mental perturbation, assailed with a flood of old and new impressions which changed incessantly in shape, grew immeasurably, and suddenly vanished as though in a turgid stream. Many thoughts occurred to him, but there was one in particular that constantly returned, overshadowing the rest. It was the thought of the silver on the bishop’s table.
Those silver knives and forks obsessed him. There they were, only a few yards away. He had seen Mme Magloire put them in the cupboard when he passed through the bishop’s room, and he had noted the position of the cupboard, on the right as one entered from the dining-room. They were solid pieces of old silver and with the big ladle would fetch at least two hundred francs – twice what he had earned in nineteen years, although it was true that he would have got more if the authorities had not robbed him.
For a whole hour he remained in a state of indecision in which there was an element of conflict. The clock struck three. He opened his eyes again and sat up briskly, reaching out an arm to grope for the knapsack that he had let fall by the bedside. Then he swung his legs over and almost without knowing it found himself seated on the bed with his feet on the floor.
He remained for some time in this posture, a sinister figure to anyone seeing him thus seated in the darkness, the only wakeful person in that sleeping house. Suddenly he bent down, removed his shoes and laid them very quietly on the bedside mat. Then he returned to his state of pensive immobility.
The ugly thoughts jostled in his brain, came and went, bearing down on him like a physical weight; and at the same time, unaccountably, with the obstinate irrelevance of distracted meditation, he was thinking of something entirely different. One of his fellow-prisoners had been a man named Brevet who kept his trousers up with a single brace of knitted cotton. The check design of that brace repeatedly occurred to him.
He might have stayed like this until daybreak if the clock had not sounded again, striking the quarter or half-hour. It roused him as though it had been a signal.
He got to his feet and stood listening. The house was quite silent. He then moved cautiously towards the window, of which the outline was clearly discernible. The night was not very dark; there was a full moon intermittently hidden by large clouds scudding in the wind, creating out of doors an alternation of darkness and light, and indoors a sort of twilight, sufficient to move by, rising and dimming like the light from a basement window when people are passing outside. Having reached the window, Valjean examined it. It was not barred; it opened on to the garden and, after the local custom, was fastened only with a small latch. Cold air flooded the room when he opened it, and he quickly closed it again. He stared into the garden with the intent look of a man inspecting rather than seeing. It was enclosed in a low whitewashed wall, easy to climb. Beyond were trees spaced at regular intervals, indicating that the wall separated the garden from an avenue or planted lane.
Having concluded his survey he turned with an air of decision, went back into the alcove, picked up his knapsack and got something out of it which he laid on the bed. He put his shoes in one of the pockets, buckled the knapsack and strapped it on his back, put his cap on his head, pulling the peak low over his eyes, and groped for his stick, which he had stood in a corner by the window. Returning to the bed, he picked up the object he had placed there. It was a short iron bar, sharpened to a point at one end.
The darkness made it difficult to determine what purpose this piece of metal was designed to serve, whether it was intended for use as a lever or a bludgeon. By daylight it could have been seen to be an ordinary miner’s spike. The convicts were sometimes put to work stone-quarrying in the hills behind Toulon, and it was not uncommon for them to be in possession of miners’ tools. The spike of thick, solid metal was used for splitting rock.
Grasping it in his right hand and holding his breath, Valjean moved stealthily towards the door of the bishop’s bedroom. He found it ajar. The bishop had not closed it.
Valjean stood listening. There was no sound.
He gave the door a gentle push with one finger-tip, cautious as a cat planning to enter a room. It yielded soundlessly, opening a little wider. He paused, then pushed again.
The door still made no sound, and now it was wide enough open for him to pass through; but close by it was a small table set at an awkward angle which still blocked his passage. There was nothing for it but to open the door wider still. Summoning his resolution, he gave it a third and more vigorous push, and this time one of the hinges emitted a long and piercing squeak.
Jean Valjean shivered. The sound was as appalling to him as that of the Last Trump. In those first wild moments of dismay he could almost believe that the hinge had become endowed with supernatural life and was barking like a watchdog to warn the sleepers in the house. He sank quivering back on his heels, hearing the blood thunder in his temples while the noise of his breath was like wind roaring out of a cave. It seemed to him impossible that the dreadful din would not arouse the household as effectively as an earthquake. The door had given the alarm. The old man would start up, the old woman would scream, help would come running; within a quarter of an hour the town would be in an uproar and the gendarmes would be active. During those moments he thought he was lost.
He stayed where he was, stock still and not daring to move. Several minutes passed. The door was now wide open. He ventured to peer into the room. Nothing stirred. He listened and heard no sound of movement in the house. It seemed that the rusty hinge had not awakened anyone.
That peril was over, but although he was still in a state of great perturbation he did not turn back. He had not turned back even when he thought he was done for. His only thought was to get the business over quickly. He moved on into the bedroom.
It was perfectly quiet. Vague shapes were discernible which by daylight would have been seen to be papers scattered over a table, open folios, books piled on a stool, garments draped over a chair, a prie-dieu, now only visible as contrasts of light and shadow. Valjean moved cautiously forward, hearing from the far side of the room the quiet, steady breathing of the bishop. He came to an abrupt stop at the bedside, finding that he had reached it sooner than he expected.
Nature at times adds her own commentary to our actions with a kind of sombre and considered eloquence, as though she were bidding us reflect. For nearly half an hour the sky had been darkened by cloud. At the moment when Jean Valjean stopped by the bed the clouds were torn asunder as though by a deliberate act, and moonlight, flooding through the tall window, fell upon the bishop’s face. He was sleeping peacefully. Because of the coldness of night in the lower Alps he wore a bed-jacket of brown wool which covered his arms to the wrists. His head lay back on the pillow in the abandonment of repose, and the hand wearing the episcopal ring, a hand responsible for so much that was good and well done, hung down outside the sheets. His face wore a look of serenity, hope, and beatitude, something more than a smile and little short of radiance, the reflection of light that was not to be seen. The spirits of the righteous in sleep commune with a mysterious heaven.
It was the light of this heaven that lay upon the bishop, a luminosity emanating from himself, the light of his own conscience. At the moment when the moon shone upon him, mingling with his inner light, he seemed in the soft half-dark to wear a halo. The brightness of the moon, the stillness of the garden, the quietness of the house, the deep repose of the hour, all this conferred a tranquil majesty upon the venerable white head now sunk in childlike sleep, an unconscious nobility approaching the divine.
Motionless in the shadow, gripping the spike in his hand, Jean Valjean stood gazing in a kind of terror at the old man. He had never before seen anything like this. On the moral plane there can be no more moving contrast than that between an uneasy conscience, bent upon a misdeed, and the unguarded slumber of innocence. In that solitary confrontation there was an element of the sublime of which Valjean was obscurely but strongly aware.
No one, not even himself, could have described his feeling. We have to imagine utmost violence in the presence of utmost gentleness. Nothing could have been discerned with certainty from his expression, which was one of haggard astonishment. He stood looking down and no one could have read his thoughts. That he was profoundly moved was evident, but what was the nature of his emotion?
He looked away from the bed. All that clearly emerged from his attitude and expression was that he was in a state of strange indecision, seemingly adrift between the two extremes of death on the one hand and salvation on the other – ready to shatter that skull or to kiss that hand.
After some moments he slowly raised his left arm and removed his cap; then, letting his arm sink as slowly as he had raised it, he resumed his attitude of contemplation, holding the cap in his left hand and the weapon in his right, the hair unruly on his wild head, while the bishop continued to sleep peacefully beneath his terrifying gaze. Above the mantelpiece the crucifix was dimly visible with its arms extended as though to both men, in benediction of the one and forgiveness of the other.
Valjean suddenly put his cap back on his head and without looking at the bishop moved quickly to the cupboard. He raised the spike, prepared to force the lock, but the key was in it. The first thing he saw when he opened the door was the basket of silver. He grabbed it, crossed the room with long strides regardless of precaution, re-entered the oratory, picked up his stick, opened the window, climbed over the sill, emptied the silver into his knapsack, threw away the basket, crossed the garden and, scrambling like a great cat over the wall, took to his heels.
At sunrise that morning Monsieur Bienvenu was in his garden. Mme Magloire came running out to him in great agitation.
‘Monseigneur, monseigneur, do you know where the silver-basket is?’
‘Yes,’ said the bishop.
‘Thank the Lord! I couldn’t think what had happened to it.’
The bishop had just retrieved the basket from one of the flowerbeds. He handed it to her saying, ‘Here you are.’
‘But it’s empty!’ she exclaimed. ‘Where’s the silver?’
‘So it’s the silver you’re worrying about?’ said the bishop. ‘I can’t tell you where that is.’
‘Heaven save us, it has been stolen! That man who came last night!’
With the zeal of an elderly watchdog Mme Magloire ran into the oratory, peered into the alcove and came running back to her master, who was now bending sadly over a cochlearia that had been damaged by the basket when it fell.
‘Monseigneur, the man’s gone! The silver has been stolen!’ She was looking about her as she spoke. The wall bore traces of the thief’s departure, one of its coping-stones having been dislodged. ‘That’s the way he went – he climbed into the lane! The monster – he’s gone off with our silver!’
The bishop after a moment’s pause turned his grave eyes on her and said gently:
‘In the first place, was it really ours?’
Mme Magloire stood dumbfounded. After a further silence the bishop went on:
‘I think I was wrong to keep it so long. It belonged to the poor. And what was that man if not one of them?’
‘Saints alive!’ exclaimed Mme Magloire. ‘It’s not on my account or Mademoiselle’s. But Monseigneur – what will Monseigneur eat with now?’
He looked at her in seeming astonishment. ‘There is always pewter.’
‘Pewter smells.’
‘Well then, iron.’
‘Iron has a taste.’
‘Then,’ said the bishop, ‘wooden forks and spoons.’
A few minutes later he was breakfasting at the table where Jean Valjean had sat the night before and remarking cheerfully to his sister, who kept silent, and to Mme Magloire, who muttered under her breath, that no spoon or fork, even wooden ones, was needed for dipping bread into a bowl of milk.
‘After all, what can you expect?’ soliloquized Mme Magloire as she bustled to and fro. ‘Taking in a man like that and putting him to sleep in the alcove. The mercy is we were only robbed. It makes me shudder!’
As the brother and sister were in the act of rising from the table a knock sounded on the door and the bishop called, ‘Come in!’
The door opened to disclose a dramatic group. Three men were holding a fourth by the arms and neck. The three were gendarmes; the fourth was Jean Valjean.
A sergeant of gendarmes, who had been standing by the door and was evidently in charge of the party, entered the room and saluted.
‘Monseigneur –’ he began.
At this Valjean, who was looking crushed and woebegone, raised his head in stupefaction.
‘Monseigneur …’ he repeated. ‘He isn’t the curé?’
‘Silence,’ said one of the gendarmes. ‘This is his lordship the Bishop.’
Monseigneur Bienvenu was meanwhile coming towards them as rapidly as his age allowed.
‘So here you are!’ he cried to Valjean. ‘I’m delighted to see you. Had you forgotten that I gave you the candlesticks as well? They’re silver like the rest, and worth a good two hundred francs. Did you forget to take them?’
Jean Valjean’s eyes had widened. He was now staring at the old man with an expression no words can convey.
‘Monseigneur,’ said the sergeant, ‘do I understand that this man was telling the truth? When we saw him he seemed to be on the run, and we thought we had better make sure. We found this silver in his knapsack and –’
‘And he told you,’ said the bishop, smiling, ‘that it had been given him by an old priest with whom he stopped the night. I can see how it was. You felt bound to bring him here, but you were mistaken.’
‘You mean,’ said the sergeant, ‘that we can let him go?’
‘Certainly.’
The gendarmes released Valjean, who seemed to cringe. ‘Am I really allowed to go?’ he said, mumbling the words as if he were talking in his sleep.
‘You heard, didn’t you?’ said a gendarme.
‘But this time,’ said the bishop, ‘you must not forget your candlesticks.’
He fetched them from the mantelpiece and handed them to Valjean. The two women watched him do so without seeking by word or look to interfere. Valjean was trembling. He took the candlesticks mechanically and with a distracted air.
‘And now,’ said the bishop, ‘go in peace. Incidentally, my friend, when next you come here you need not go through the garden. This door is never locked.’ He turned to the gendarmes. ‘Thank you, gentlemen.’
The gendarmes withdrew. Valjean stayed motionless as though he were on the verge of collapse. The bishop came up to him and said in a low voice:
‘Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man.’
Valjean, who did not recall having made any promise, was silent. The bishop had spoken the words slowly and deliberately. He concluded with a solemn emphasis:
‘Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.’
Jean Valjean left the town as though he were still on the run. He plunged into the countryside, blindly following lanes and footpaths and not realizing that he was going in circles. Thus he spent the morning, without eating or feeling any sense of hunger. He was overwhelmed by new and strange sensations, among them a kind of anger, he did not know against whom. He could not have said if he was uplifted or humiliated. He had moments of strange tenderness which he resisted with all the hardness of heart which twenty years had brought him. His state of mind was physically exhausting. He perceived with dismay that the kind of dreadful calm instilled in him by injustice and misfortune had begun to crumble. What was to take its place? At moments he positively wished himself back in prison, and that these things had never happened to him; at least he would have been less distraught. Although it was late in the year there were still a few last flowers in the hedges whose scent as he passed recalled pictures of his childhood; and these memories, so long buried, were almost intolerable.
Thus he spent the day in a state of growing turmoil; and in the evening, when the sun had sunk so low that every pebble cast a shadow, he was seated on the ground by a thicket, in an expanse of russet plain that was totally deserted. Only the Alps were visible on the horizon; not so much as a village church-steeple was to be seen. He was then perhaps seven miles from Digne, and a footpath crossed the plain a few yards from the place where he sat.
Into his sombre meditations, which must have rendered his ragged appearance still more alarming to any passer-by, a lively sound intruded. A boy of about ten was coming along the footpath, singing as he came. He carried a vielle, a kind of small hurdy-gurdy, slung over his shoulder, and a box with his belongings on his back; one of those gay and harmless child vagrants, generally chimneysweeps, who go from village to village with knees showing through the holes in their trousers. Now and then he paused, still singing, to play at ‘bones’ with the coins he was carrying, tossing them in the air and catching them on the back of his hand. They probably represented his entire fortune, and one was a piece of forty sous.
He stopped by the thicket to play his game without having noticed Jean Valjean. Thus far he had caught all the coins, but this time he dropped the forty-sou piece, which rolled in the direction of Valjean, who promptly set his foot on it.
The boy had seen where it went. Without appearing in any way disconcerted, he went up to him.
The place was entirely solitary with no other soul in sight on the footpath or the plain, and no sound except the distant cry of a flock of birds passing high overhead. The boy stood with his back to the setting sun, which lighted his hair with threads of gold and cast a red glare on Valjean’s brooding face.
‘Monsieur,’ said the boy with the childish trustfulness that is a mingling of innocence and ignorance, ‘may I have my coin?’
‘What’s your name?’ asked Valjean.
‘Petit-Gervais, Monsieur.’
‘Clear out,’ said Valjean.
‘Please, Monsieur,’ said the child, ‘may I have my money back?’
Jean Valjean lowered his head and did not reply.
‘Please, Monsieur.’
Valjean was staring at the ground.
‘My money!’ the boy cried. ‘My piece of silver. My coin!’
Valjean seemed not to hear him. The boy seized hold of his collar and shook him, while at the same time he tried to shift the heavy, iron-studded shoe covering his coin.
‘I want my money, my forty-sou piece!’
He began to cry, and Jean Valjean, who was still seated, raised his head. His eyes were troubled. He stared with a sort of amazement at the child, then reached for his stick and cried in a terrifying voice, ‘Who’s there?’
‘It’s me, Monsieur. Petit-Gervais. Only me. Give me back my forty sous, if you please. Will you please move your foot?’
Then the boy grew angry, small as he was, and his tone became almost threatening.
‘Move your foot, can’t you! Are you going to move your foot?’
‘Are you still there?’ said Valjean, suddenly standing up but still keeping his foot on the coin. ‘Damn you, clear out!’
The boy looked at him and was suddenly frightened. After a moment of stupefaction he turned and ran, without looking back or uttering a sound. Out of breath, he eventually came to a stop, and amid the tumult of his thoughts Valjean heard the sound of his distant sobbing. A minute later he had vanished from sight.
The sun had set. The shadows were closing about Jean Valjean. He had eaten nothing all day and was probably feverish. He remained standing in the same place, not having moved since the boy had run off. While his breath came slowly and unevenly his eyes were fixed on a spot some yards in front of him, as though he were wholly absorbed in contemplating a blue fragment of broken pottery lying in the grass. He shivered suddenly, conscious of the chill of evening.
He pulled down the peak of his cap, tried mechanically to fasten his shirt over his chest and then stooped to pick up his stick. In doing so his eye caught the glitter of the forty-sou piece, half buried by his foot in the earth.
It affected him like an electric shock. ‘What’s that?’ he muttered under his breath. He stepped back a couple of paces and then stood still, unable to detach his gaze from that object shining in the dusk like an eye watching him. After some moments’ pause he moved convulsively forward, snatched up the coin and then stood gazing to every point of the compass, quivering like a frightened animal in search of a hiding-place.
There was nothing to be seen. Night was falling, the plain was cold and empty and a purple mist was rising to obscure the twilight. He uttered an exclamation and began to walk rapidly in the direction taken by the boy. After going a hundred yards or so he stopped and stared again but still saw nothing. He shouted at the top of his voice:
‘Petit-Gervais! Petit-Gervais!’
He waited, but there was no reply.
He was standing in the midst of gloom and desolation, surrounded by nothing but the dusk in which his gaze was lost and the silence in which his voice died away. A keen wind had begun to blow, endowing the objects around him with a kind of dismal life. Bushes waved their branches with a strange fury, as though they were threatening and pursuing.
He went on walking and then broke into a run, stopping now and then to cry out amid the solitude in a voice that was at once terrifying and despairing, ‘Petit-Gervais! Petit-Gervais!’ If the boy had heard he would certainly have hidden; but by now he was probably far away.
Valjean presently met a priest on horseback. He went up to him and asked:
‘Monsieur le curé, have you seen a boy go by?’
‘A boy called Petit-Gervais.’
‘No. I’ve seen no one.’
Valjean produced two five-franc pieces and handed them to the priest.
‘For your poor, Monsieur le curé … He was a boy of about ten with a box on his back, I think, and carrying a vielle. He was tramping, a chimney-sweep or something of the kind.’
‘I haven’t seen him.’
‘Petit-Gervais his name was. Doesn’t he come from one of the villages round here?’
‘I think not,’ said the priest. ‘It sounds as though he was a stranger in these parts, a vagrant. We get them from time to time. We know nothing about them.’
With an almost savage gesture Valjean produced two more five-franc pieces and gave them to the priest. ‘For your poor,’ he said again. And then he cried out: ‘Monsieur l’abbé, you must have me arrested. I’m a thief.’
The priest clapped his heels to his horse’s flanks and rode off in terror.
Valjean continued to run in the same direction as before. He ran for a long time, calling as he went, but he saw no one else. Several times he turned aside to inspect a patch of shadow which might have been a person lying or crouching, but these turned out to be bushes or small boulders. Finally, at a place where three paths intersected, he stood still. Gazing into the distance he called for the last time, ‘Petit-Gervais! Petit-Gervais!’ and his voice sank without echo into the mist. He again murmured, ‘Petit-Gervais,’ so faintly that the words were scarcely audible, and this was his last attempt. His legs suddenly buckled under him as though some unseen power had struck him down with all the weight of his guilty conscience. He sank exhausted on to a piece of rock with his hands clutching his hair and his head between his knees, and he exclaimed, ‘Vile wretch that I am!’
His heart overflowed and he wept, for the first time in nineteen years.
When he left the bishop’s dwelling Jean Valjean, as we know, had been in a state of mind unlike anything he had ever experienced before and was quite unable to account for what was taking place within him. He had sought to harden his heart against the old man’s saintly act and moving words. ‘You have promised me to become an honest man. I am buying your soul. I am rescuing it from the spirit of perversity and giving it to God.’ The words constantly returned to him and he sought to suppress them with arrogance, which in all of us is the stronghold of evil. Obscurely he perceived that the priest’s forgiveness was the most formidable assault he had ever sustained; that if he resisted it his heart would be hardened once and for all, and that if he yielded he must renounce the hatred which the acts of men had implanted in him during so many years, and to which he clung. He saw dimly that this time he must either conquer or be conquered, and that the battle was now joined, a momentous and decisive battle between the evil in himself and the goodness in that other man.
Beset by these intimations, he reeled like a drunken man: but as, haggard-eyed, he went on his way, had he any clear notion of what must be the outcome for him of that episode in Digne? Did he truly understand all that it implied? Did any voice whisper to him that he was at a turning-point in his life, that henceforth there could be no middle way for him, that he must become either the best of men or the worst, rise even higher than the bishop himself or sink lower than the felon, reach supreme heights of goodness or become a monster of depravity?
We must again ask the question, did any dim understanding of all this enter his mind? It is true that misfortune sharpens the wits; but still it may be doubted whether Jean Valjean was in a condition to grasp so much. Such notions as occurred to him were glimpsed rather than clearly seen and did no more than plunge him into a state of agonized and almost intolerable confusion. The encounter with the bishop, immediately following his release from the black limbo of prison, had dazed him spiritually in the way that the eyes may be dazzled by the brilliance of daylight after a period of total darkness. The prospect now proposed to him, a life of goodness and purity, caused him to tremble with apprehension. He was truly at a loss. Like an owl overtaken by a sudden sunrise, he was blinded by the radiance of virtue.
What was certain, although he did not realize it, was that he was no longer the same man. Everything in him was changed. It was no longer in his power to behave as though the bishop had not spoken to him and touched his heart.
And it was in this state of disarray that he had encountered Petit-Gervais and stolen his forty sous. Why had he done so? Assuredly he could not have answered the question. Had it been a last stirring of the evil generated in him by prison, a lingering impulse akin to what the physicists term latent energy? It had been that, and perhaps it had also been something less. In simple terms, it was not the man who had stolen; it was the animal which, from habit and instinct, had brutally set its foot on the coin while the man’s intelligence wrestled with the new and dumbfounding thoughts that preoccupied it. When the man saw what the animal had done, Jean Valjean recoiled with a cry of horror.
The fact is – a strange phenomenon, only conceivable in the situation in which he found himself – that in robbing the boy he had committed an act of which he was no longer capable.
In any event, this last misdeed had a decisive effect upon him. It piercingly dispelled the chaos in his mind, separating light from darkness and working upon his spirit like a chemical reagent introduced into a turgid solution, which clarifies one element and precipitates another.
His immediate impulse, before taking time for thought, like a man clutching at a straw, had been to find the boy and return his money, and when he failed to do this he gave way to despair. In the moment when he uttered the words ‘vile wretch’, he had seen himself for what he was, being so far detached from himself as to see something that was like a ghost. What he saw was the flesh-and-blood man, stick in hand, clothing bedraggled, knapsack stuffed with stolen goods on his back, dark of face and darker still in thought, Jean Valjean the felon.
Excess of suffering, as we have seen, had made him in some sort a visionary. This was a vision. He truly saw that Jean Valjean, that evil countenance confronting him. At that moment he was near to asking who the man was, and he was appalled.
It was one of those moments of blinding and yet frighteningly calm insight when the thought goes so deep that it passes beyond reality. The tangible world is no longer seen; all that we see, as though from outside, is the world of our own spirit.
Thus he contemplated himself, as it were face to face, and there arose in his vision, at some mysterious depth, a sort of light resembling that of a torch. But as he looked more closely at this light growing in his consciousness he saw that it had a human form and that it was the bishop.
His mind’s eye considered these two men now presented to him, the bishop and Jean Valjean. Only the first could have overshadowed the second. By a singular process special to this kind of ecstasy, as his trance continued the bishop grew and gained splendour in his eyes, while Jean Valjean shrank and faded. A moment came when Valjean was no more than a shadow, and then he vanished entirely. The bishop alone remained, flooding that unhappy soul with radiance.
Jean Valjean wept for a long time, sobbing convulsively with more than a woman’s abandon, more than the anguish of a child. And as he wept a new day dawned in his spirit, a day both wonderful and terrible. He saw all things with a clarity that he had never known before – his past life, his first offence and long expiation, his outward coarsening and inward hardening, his release enriched with so many plans for revenge, the incident at the bishop’s house, and this last abominable act, the robbing of a child, rendered the more shameful by the fact that it followed the bishop’s forgiveness. He saw all this, the picture of his life, which was horrible, and of his own soul, hideous in its ugliness. Yet a new day had now dawned for that life and soul; and he seemed to see Satan bathed in the light of Paradise.
How long did he stay weeping? What did he then do and where did he go? We do not know. But it is said on that same night the stage-driver from Grenoble, passing through the cathedral square in Digne at three in the morning, saw in the shadows the figure of a man kneeling in an attitude of prayer outside the door of Monseigneur Bienvenu.