MEANWHILE, WHAT of the mother who, as the people of Mont-fermeil supposed, had abandoned her child?
After leaving Cosette with the Thénardiers, Fantine had journeyed on to Montreuil-sur-mer. This, we may recall, was in the year 1818.
It was ten years since she had left the district, and in that time things had greatly changed. While she had been sinking into the depths of poverty, her native town had grown prosperous. During the past two years there had occurred one of those industrial developments which are major events in the life of a small community.
We must give some account of this matter, and indeed dwell upon it, since it is of some importance.
The traditional local industry of Montreuil-sur-mer was the manufacture of imitation English jet beads and the ‘black glass’ of Germany. Because of the cost of raw materials the industry had never been prosperous and its workers had been underpaid, but this situation had recently been transformed. Towards the end of 1815 a newcomer to the town had had the idea of substituting shellac for resin, and had also devised a simpler and less expensive form of clasp for such things as bracelets. These trifling changes amounted to a revolution. They greatly reduced costs, which in the first place enabled the trade to pay higher wages, and thus benefited the district. And they made it possible to reduce prices while increasing the manufacturer’s profit. Three beneficial results; and in less than three years the innovator had grown rich, which is good, and had spread prosperity around him, which is better.
He was a stranger to the district. Nothing was known of his origins and little about how he started in life. He was said to have arrived in the town with very little money, a few hundred francs; and with this scanty capital, applied to the service of an ingenious idea and fostered with order and shrewdness, he had made a fortune for himself and for the community.
His clothes, his general appearance and his speech, when he came to Montreuil-sur-mer, had been those of a labourer. But it seems that on the December evening when he unobtrusively entered the town, with a pack on his back and a thorn stick in his hand, a serious fire had broken out in the Town Hall. Plunging into the flames he had, at the risk of his life, rescued two children whose father, as it turned out, was the Captain of Gendarmerie. So no one had asked to see his identity papers. He went by the name of Père Madeleine.
He was a man of about fifty, reserved in manner but good-hearted, and this was all that could be said about him.
Thanks to the rapid growth of the industry which he so admirably reorganized, Montreuil-sur-mer became a place of some consequence. Large orders came from Spain, which absorbs a great quantity of jet. Sales reached a scale almost rivalling those of London and Berlin, and Père Madeleine’s profits were so great that in the second year he was able to build a new factory consisting of two large workshops, one for men and the other for women. The needy had only to apply, and they could be sure of finding employment and a living wage. Père Madeleine demanded goodwill from the men, pure morals from the women, and honesty from all. He separated the sexes so that the women could remain virtuous. In this he was inflexible, but it was the only matter in which he could be said to be intolerant; and since Montreuil-sur-mer was a garrison town, with ample opportunities for backsliding, his severity was the more justified. In general his coming had been providential for the whole region, once so stagnant, which now pulsed with the vigour of healthy industry. Unemployment and extreme poverty were forgotten. No pocket was so humble that it did not contain a little money, no dwelling so obscure that it did not shelter a little happiness.
Through the stir of activity of which he was the cause and centre, Père Madeleine, as we have said, had made a fortune for himself; but, strangely in a man of business, this did not seem to be his principal concern. He seemed to give far more thought to others than to himself. In 1820 he was known to have a credit of 635,000 francs at the banking-house of Laffitte; but, in addition to setting aside this sum, he had spent more than a million on the town and the poor.
The hospital was under-financed; he had endowed ten more beds. Montreuil was divided into an Upper and a Lower Town. The Lower Town, where he lived, had only one school, of which the ancient building was crumbling in ruins. He built two new schools, one for girls and the other for boys, and out of his own income doubled the meagre official salaries of the schoolmaster and mistress. To someone who expressed surprise at this he said, ‘The first two servants of the State are the nurse and the teacher.’ He established an old people’s home, a thing then almost unknown in France, and a fund for the assistance of old and infirm workpeople. With the building of the new factory, a new residential area had sprung up around it in which there were a good many poor families, so he installed a free apothecary’s shop.
At first the town gossips said of him, ‘He’s simply out to make money.’ When it was found that he enriched the community before enriching himself they said, ‘He has political ambitions.’ This seemed the more likely since he was religious and attended church service, which was considered highly commendable at that time. He went to early mass every Sunday. The local deputy, always on his guard against competition, viewed this religious tendency with some apprehension. He had himself been a member of the corps législatif under the Empire, and he shared the religious views of an ex-Jesuit named Fouché, the Duke of Otranto, whose creature and friend he had been. In private he was amiably derisive of God. But when he learned that Madeleine, the wealthy manufacturer, went to seven o’clock mass, he scented a possible rival and resolved to outdo him. He engaged a Jesuit confessor and went to high mass and vespers. Political rivalry in those days was, almost literally, a race to the altar-steps. The poor, as well as God, benefited by the deputy’s misgivings, for he also endowed two hospital beds – making twelve in all.
In 1819 it was rumoured in the town that on the recommendation of the prefect, and in consideration of his public services, the king was to nominate M. Madeleine mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer. Those who had declared him to be a political careerist seized upon this with the delight men always feel in exclaiming, ‘I told you so.’ The town was in a state of high excitement. And the rumour turned out to be correct. A few days later the nomination appeared in Le Moniteur. The next day M. Madeleine refused it.
During that same year, 1819, the products of Madeleine’s new manufacturing process were displayed at the Industrial Exhibition, and acting on the jury’s report the king appointed the inventor to be a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. This led to a new theory in the town – ‘So that’s what he was really after!’ But M. Madeleine refused to accept the Grand Cross.
Decidedly the man was an enigma. The know-alls saved their faces by saying, ‘Well anyway he’s up to something.’
The district owed him a great deal and the poor owed him everything. He was so invaluable that he had to be honoured and so kindly that he had to be loved. His workpeople in particular adored him, and he accepted their adoration with a kind of grave melancholy. When it became known that he was extremely rich the ‘society’ of the town took notice of him, addressing him as Monsieur Madeleine; but his workpeople and the children still called him Père Madeleine, and it was this that drew from him his warmest smile. As he rose in the world, invitations were showered on him. ‘Society’ sought him out. The doors of Montreuil’s most select drawing-rooms, which had of course been closed to the tradesman, were flung wide to welcome the millionaire. Frequent approaches were made to him, but he rejected them all.
And here the gossips were on firmer ground. He was, they said, an ignorant and uneducated man. No one knew where he came from. He would not know how to behave in polite society. It was not even certain that he could read.
When he was seen to be making money they had said, ‘He’s a business man.’ When he scattered his money in charity they said, ‘He’s a careerist.’ When he refused to accept honours they said, ‘He’s an adventurer.’ When he rejected polite society they said, ‘He’s a peasant.’
By 1820, five years after his arrival in Montreuil-sur-mer, the services he had rendered were so outstanding, and public opinion was so unanimous, that the king again appointed him mayor of the town. Again he refused; but this time, faced by the prefect’s rejection of his refusal, the insistence of the local dignitaries and the supplications of the people in the streets, he finally gave way. It was said that what had induced him to change his mind were the words shouted at him almost angrily by an old woman standing in her doorway – ‘A good mayor is a useful person. How can you hold back when you have the chance to do good?’
This was the third stage of his rise in the world. ‘Le père Madeleine’ had become Monsieur Madeleine, and Monsieur Madeleine had become Monsieur le Meire.
In other respects he remained as simple as on the day of his arrival. He was grey-haired and grave-eyed, with the tanned complexion of a working man and the thoughtful countenance of a philosopher. He ordinarily wore a broad-brimmed hat and a long tail-coat of broad-cloth buttoned to the chin. He performed his official duties as mayor, but otherwise kept himself to himself, speaking to few people, evading courtesies, exchanging brief greetings and hastily passing on, smiling to avoid the need for speech and giving alms to avoid the need for smiling. The women called him ‘a kind old bear’. His greatest pleasure was to go for walks through the countryside.
He always took his meals alone, with a book at his elbow. He had a small but well-selected library. He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends. It seemed that as his leisure increased with his growing fortune he made use of it to improve himself. His use of language became more refined, less uncouth, and more discriminating.
He often carried a shotgun on his walks but seldom used it. When he did so, however, he was a terrifyingly good marksman. He never killed a harmless animal or shot at a small bird.
Although he was no longer young it was said of him that he was immensely strong. He had a helping hand for whoever needed it, would hoist a fallen horse to its feet, put a shoulder to a bogged-down wheel, grasp the horns of an escaped bull. He always left home with a pocketful of small change and came back with it empty. When he walked through a village the ragged children ran after him in delight, swarming round him like flies.
He must at some time have lived in the country, for he possessed much recondite knowledge which he passed on to the peasants. He taught them how to destroy corn-moth by spraying the barn and soaking the cracks in the floor with a solution of common salt, and how to get rid of boll-weevil by hanging bunches of orviot in blossom on the walls and in the roofs of store-rooms and cottages. He had recipes against vetch and ground-ivy and other parasitic weeds that invade a cornfield. He protected a rabbit-enclosure against rats simply with the scent of a small Barbary pig which he installed in it.
On one occasion he watched a party of countryfolk busily engaged in pulling up nettles. Contemplating the uprooted and withering plants, he said: ‘They’re dead. But it would be a good thing if use were made of them. The young nettle is an excellent vegetable, and as it ages it develops fibres like those of hemp or flax. Nettle-cloth is as good as hemp-cloth. Chopped nettles can be fed to poultry and mashed nettles are good for cattle; nettle-seed mixed with their fodder gives the animals a glossy skin; the roots mixed with salt produce an admirable yellow dye. Moreover, nettles are a crop that can be harvested twice a year. And they need almost nothing – very little space and no husbanding or cultivation. Their only drawback is that the seed falls as it ripens and is difficult to harvest. With very little trouble nettles can be put to use; being neglected they become obnoxious and are therefore destroyed. How many men share the fate of the nettle!’ After a moment of silence he added: ‘My friends, remember this, there are no bad plants or bad men. There is only bad husbandry.’
The children loved him especially because he knew how to make fascinating toys out of straw and coconuts.
When he saw a church-door draped in black he entered, seeking out funerals as other men seek out christenings. Widowhood and the afflictions of others appealed to his strongly compassionate nature; he mingled with the mourners and the priests chanting round a coffin. It seemed that the words of the funeral psalms, with their vision of another world, were especially attuned to his thoughts. He listened with eyes uplifted, as though straining towards the mysteries of the infinite, to the sad voices singing on the threshold of the abyss of death.
He performed countless acts of kindness with as much precaution as though they were misdeeds. He would secretly enter a house after dark and go furtively up the stairs; and some poor devil, returning to his attic, would find that his door had been opened, and even forced, in his absence. His instant thought would be that he had been robbed, but then he would find nothing gone and a gold piece lying on the table. The ‘miscreant’ was Père Madeleine.
He was a friendly but sad figure. People said of him: ‘A rich man who is not proud. A fortunate man who does not look happy.’
He was a man of mystery. It was said of him that he allowed no one to enter his bedroom, a real anchorite’s cell furnished with winged hour-glasses and decorated with skulls and crossbones. This tale was repeated so often that certain elegant and audacious young ladies called upon him and asked, ‘Monsieur le Maire, may we be allowed to see your bedroom? It is said to be like a cave.’ He smiled and at once showed them in, putting them greatly out of countenance. It was a room with commonplace mahogany furniture, as ugly as such furniture generally is, and with cheap paper on the walls. They found nothing remarkable in it except two candlesticks of an antiquated design on the mantelpiece, which were presumably silver ‘because they were stamped’ – an observation very typical of the small-town mind.
But despite this, people went on saying that no one ever entered that room, and that it was like a tomb or a hermit’s cave.
It was also rumoured that he had ‘immense sums’ on deposit with Laffitte, and that by a special arrangement these were held at his immediate disposal, so that he could walk into the bank whenever he chose and after signing a receipt walk out with two or three millions in his pocket. The reality of those ‘two or three millions’ was, as we have said, a sum of six hundred and thirty or forty thousand francs.
Early in 1821 the newspapers announced the passing of Monsieur Myriel, Bishop of Digne, ‘known as Monseigneur Bienvenu’, who had died in the odour of sanctity at the age of eighty-two. A detail may be added which the newspapers omitted to mention. For several years prior to his death the bishop had been blind but contented in his blindness, having his sister at his side.
We may remark in passing that to be blind and beloved may, in this world where nothing is perfect, be among the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. To have a wife, daughter, or sister continually at call, a devoted being who is there because we have need of her and because she cannot live without us; to be able to measure her affection by the constancy of her presence and reflect, ‘If she gives me all her time it is because I have all her heart’; to see the thought in default of the face, weigh fidelity in exclusion of the world, hear the rustle of a dress as though it were the rustling of wings, the comings and goings, the everyday speech, the snatch of song; to be conscious every minute of our own attraction, feeling the more powerful for our weakness, becoming in obscurity and through obscurity the star around which an angel gravitates – there are few felicities to equal this. The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself; and this assurance the blind man possesses. In his affliction, to be served is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? No. Possessing love he is not deprived of light. A love, moreover, that is wholly pure. There can be no blindness where there is this certainty. Soul gropes for soul and finds it. And the found and proven soul is a woman. A hand sustains you, and it is hers; lips touch your forehead and they are her lips; the breathing at your side is her breath. To possess her every feeling from devotion to pity, to be never left in solitude, to have the support of that gentle frailty, that slender, unbreakable reed, to feel the touch of Providence in her hands and be able to clasp it in your arms, a palpable God – what happiness can be greater? The heart, that secret, celestial flower, mysteriously blossoms, and one would not exchange one’s darkness for all light. The angel spirit is there, always there; if she moves away it is to return, she fades like a dream to reappear like reality. We feel the approaching warmth, and, with its coming, serenity, our gaiety and ecstasy overflow; we are radiant in our darkness. There are the countless small cares, those trifles that become huge in our void. The tenderest tones of the feminine voice are used for our comfort and replace the vanished world; they are a spiritual caress; seeing nothing we feel ourselves adored. It is a paradise in shadow.
This was the paradise from which Monseigneur Bienvenu passed to the other.
His death was reported in the local paper at Montreuil-sur-mer, and on the following day Monsieur Madeleine appeared clad in black with a band of crêpe round his hat. The matter was much discussed in the town since it seemed to throw a light on his background. ‘He’s in mourning for the Bishop of Digne,’ said the drawing-rooms, and this redounded greatly to his credit, entitling him, for the moment, to a higher degree of consideration on the part of the aristocracy of Montreuil-sur-mer. The infinitesimal Faubourg Saint-Germain of the town was disposed to abandon its attitude of aloofness, since he appeared to be related to a bishop. Monsieur Madeleine was made aware of his promotion by an increase in the number of curtsies he received from the older ladies and smiles from the younger ones. One evening a dowager of that small circle, entitled by her ancient lineage to be inquisitive, ventured to question him. ‘No doubt, Monsieur le Maire, the late Bishop of Digne was your cousin?’
‘No, Madame.’
‘But,’ said the lady, ‘you are in mourning for him.’
He replied: ‘That is because in my youth I was a lackey in his family.’
It was also noted that whenever a vagrant boy appeared in the town looking for chimneys to sweep, the mayor sent for him, asked his name and gave him money. The word went round among the young ‘Savoyards’ and a great many of them came.
By degrees all opposition to him had died down. At first M. Madeleine had been subjected to the ill-report and calumny that by a sort of law afflict all those who become prominent; this had gradually dwindled into malicious anecdote and gossip which at length had ceased entirely. Respect and cordial esteem for him had grown until, in about 1821, the words Monsieur le Maire were spoken in Montreuil-sur-mer in much the same tone as the words Monseigneur l’Evêque had been spoken in Digne in 1815. People came from twenty miles around to consult Monsieur Madeleine. He resolved disputes, prevented law-suits, reconciled enemies. Every man trusted him to judge fairly, as though his guiding spirit were a book of natural law. It was like an epidemic of veneration spreading, in a matter of six or seven years, throughout the province.
One man only was wholly immune from the contagion and, regardless of what M. Madeleine did, refused to succumb to it as though from an unassailable instinct of wariness and distrust. It seems indeed that there exists in some men a genuinely animal instinct, pure and authentic as are all instincts, which determines their antipathies and sympathies, inexorably discriminating between one person and another without hesitation or afterthought, neither weakening nor contradicting itself; which is lucid within its own obscurity, infallible and overweening, rejecting every counsel of intelligence and every compromise of reason, and which, disdaining all outward appearances, secretly warns the man-dog of the presence of the man-cat, the man-fox of the presence of the man-lion.
It happened often that Monsieur Madeleine, walking amiably through the streets and receiving the affectionate greetings of his fellow-citizens, was observed by a tall man in a grey tail-coat carrying a heavy stick and wearing a low-brimmed hat. This person would watch him until he was out of sight, standing with arms crossed, slowly shaking his head and thrusting his lower lip against the upper until it reached his nose in a sort of purposeful grimace which seemed to say, ‘Who is that man? I’ve seen him before. Anyway, he isn’t fooling me.’
He was one of those people who, even glimpsed, make an immediate impression; there was an intensity about him that was almost a threat. His name was Javert and he belonged to the police.
In Montreuil-sur-mer he performed the distasteful but necessary duties of a police-inspector. He had not witnessed Madeleine’s beginnings. When he took up his present post, which he owed to the influence of the Paris Prefect of Police, the manufacturer’s fortune was already made and Père Madeleine had become Monsieur Madeleine.
Certain police officers have a particular cast of countenance in which primitive instincts are mingled with an air of authority. Javert had the air of authority, but without the primitive instincts.
It is our belief that if the soul were visible to the eye every member of the human species would be seen to correspond to some species of the animal world and a truth scarcely perceived by thinkers would be readily confirmed, namely, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at a time.
Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought. But since they are no more than shadows, He has not made them educable in the full sense of the word – Why should He do so? Our souls, on the other hand, being realities with a purpose proper to themselves, have been endowed with intelligence, that is to say, the power to learn. Well-managed social education can extract from any human spirit, no matter of what kind, such usefulness as it contains.
This, of course, is to confine the matter within the limits of our visible earthly life, without prejudging the deeper question of the anterior and ulterior nature of creatures which are not men. The visible personality affords us no grounds for denying the existence of a latent personality. Having made this reservation, we may proceed.
Granted the supposition that in every man there is contained a species of the animal kingdom, we may at once place Inspector Javert. The Asturian peasants believe that in every wolf-litter there is a dog-whelp which the mother kills, because otherwise when it grows larger it will devour the rest of her young. Endow this dog with a human face, and you have Javert.
He had been born in prison, the son of a fortune-teller whose husband was in the galleys. As he grew older he came to believe that he was outside society with no prospect of ever entering it. But he noted that there were two classes of men whom society keeps inexorably at arm’s length – those who prey upon it, and those who protect it. The only choice open to him was between those two. At the same time, he was a man with a profound instinct for correctitude, regularity, and probity, and with a consuming hatred for the vagabond order to which he himself belonged. He joined the police.
He did well. At the age of forty he was an inspector, having as a young man been a prison-warder in the Midi. But before going further let us look more closely at the human face which we have ascribed to Javert.
It consisted of a flat nose with two wide nostrils flanked by huge side-whiskers. A first glance at those two thickets enclosing two caverns was disconcerting. When Javert laughed, a rare and terrible occurrence, his thin lips parted to display not only his teeth but his gums, and a deep and savage furrow formed on either side of his nose as though on the muzzle of a beast of prey. Javert unsmiling was a bulldog; when he laughed he was a tiger. For the rest – a narrow brow and a large jaw, locks of hair concealing the forehead and falling over the eyebrows, permanent wrinkles between the eyes resembling a star of wrath, a dark gaze, a tight, formidable mouth, a look of fierce command.
His mental attitude was compounded of two very simple principles, admirable in themselves but which, by carrying them to extremes, he made almost evil – respect for authority and hatred of revolt against it. Theft, murder and every other crime were to him all forms of revolt. Everybody who played any part in the running of the State, from the First Minister to the garde champêtre, was invested in his eyes with a kind of mystical sanctity, and he felt nothing but contempt, aversion and disgust for those who, even if only once, transgressed beyond the bounds of law. His judgements were absolute, admitting no exceptions. He said on the one hand, ‘The official cannot be wrong, the magistrate is always right,’ and on the other hand, ‘Those others are lost, no good can come of them.’ He shared unreservedly the extreme views of those who attribute to human law some sort of power to damn or, if you prefer, to place on record the damned, and who set a river Styx at the entrance to society. He was stoical, earnest and austere, given to gloomy pondering, and like all fanatics, both humble and arrogant. His eyes were cold and piercing as a gimlet. His whole life was contained in two words, wakefulness and watchfulness. He drew a straight line through all that is most tortuous in this world. He possessed the conscience appropriate to his function, and his duties were his religion; he was a spy in the way that other men are priests. Woe to those who fell into his hands! He would have arrested his own father escaping from prison and denounced his mother for breaking parole, and he would have done it with a glow of conscious rectitude. His life was one of rigorous austerity, isolation, self-denial and chastity without distractions; a life of unswerving duty, with the police service playing the role that Sparta played for the Spartans – ceaseless alertness, fanatical honesty, the spy carved in marble, a mingling of Brutus and Vidocq.*
Javert’s entire personality was that of the man who watches from concealment. The mystical school of Joseph de Maistre, which at that time was enriching the extreme monarchist journals with a high-flown cosmogony, would certainly have regarded him as a symbol. Normally, one could never see his forehead, hidden by his hat, his eyes buried beneath his eyebrows, his chin sunk in his cravat, his hands drawn up within his sleeves or the stick which he carried beneath his cloak. But when the time was ripe all this would spring out of hiding as though from an ambush, the narrow, bony forehead, the baleful glare, the menacing chin, the big hands and threatening cudgel.
In his rare leisure moments he read books, although he hated reading; which is to say that he was not wholly illiterate. The fact was now and then apparent in his speech. As we have said, he had no vices. When he was pleased with himself he allowed himself a pinch of snuff, his sole concession to human frailty.
It is small wonder that Javert was the terror of that class of people who are listed in the annual statistics of the Ministry of Justice as Gens sans aveu, persons without status. The mere mention of his name sufficed to scatter them; the sight of him petrified them. Such was this formidable man.
Javert had an eye constantly fixed on Monsieur Madeleine, an eye filled with suspicion and puzzlement. Madeleine had eventually become aware of this, but he seemed to regard it as a matter of no importance. He never questioned Javert, neither sought him out nor avoided him, and bore his heavy scrutiny without appearing to notice it, treating him, as he treated everyone, with an easy good-humour.
From certain words Javert had let fall it was evident that secretly, with the inquisitiveness of his kind which is as much a matter of instinct as of deliberate intent, he had studied all the traces of his earlier life which Monsieur Madeleine had left in other places. He seemed to know, and hinted as much, that someone had been making inquiries in another part of the country regarding a family that had disappeared. He was once heard to mutter to himself, ‘I think I’ve got him.’ But after that he was moodily silent. It seemed that the thread he had thought to grasp was broken.
For the rest, and the qualification is necessary for words that may otherwise bear too absolute a meaning, there can be nothing truly infallible in any human being, and instinct, of its nature, may be confused, misled, and perverted. Otherwise it would be superior to intelligence, and animals would be more enlightened than men.
Javert was plainly disconcerted by Monsieur Madeleine’s ease and tranquillity of manner, but an occasion arose when his own strange demeanour attracted the notice of Monsieur Madeleine. What happened was as follows.
Passing one morning through one of the unpaved alleys of the town Madeleine heard sounds of disturbance and saw a group of people gathered not far away. He found, on going up to them, that an old man known as Père Fauchelevent had been trapped beneath his cart after the horse had fallen.
Fauchelevent was one of the few people who at that time were still unfriendly to Monsieur Madeleine. A former law-scrivener, comparatively educated for a countryman, his business had already been going downhill when Madeleine arrived in the district. He had watched the rise of the humble day-labourer while he, a craftsman, was on the road to ruin, and, consumed with jealousy, had done what he could to injure Madeleine whenever the chance arose. Eventually he had gone bankrupt and being an elderly man without wife or family, possessing nothing but a horse and cart, he had since then earned his living as a carrier.
The horse had broken both hind-legs and could not get up. Fauchelevent was caught between the wheels. The manner of the fall was such that the whole weight of the heavily loaded cart was on his chest. Attempts had been made to drag him clear, but without success. An ill-judged, clumsy movement, a sudden pull of the cart, might crush him. There was no way of releasing him except by lifting the cart from below. Javert, who was already on the spot, had sent for a jack.
The crowd drew back respectfully as Madeleine approached. He at once asked if a jack was available and was told that someone had gone for one to the nearest smithy, but that it would take a quarter of an hour to bring it.
‘A quarter of an hour!’ exclaimed Madeleine.
It had rained hard the day before; the ground was very soft and the cart was sinking deeper into the mud, pressing more heavily on the old man’s chest. In a matter of minutes his ribs might give way.
‘This can’t wait a quarter of an hour,’ said Madeleine, turning to the men standing round.
‘There’s nothing else to be done.’
‘But it’ll be too late. Don’t you see the cart’s sinking deeper?’
‘All the same –’
‘Look,’ said Madeleine. ‘There’s still room for a man to crawl under the cart and lift it on his back. In half a minute the old man can be pulled out. Is there anyone here with the muscle and the heart? I’m offering five louis d’or.’
No one moved.
‘Ten,’ said Madeleine.
The bystanders avoided his gaze. One of them muttered: ‘He’d have to be devilish strong. He’d risk being crushed himself.’
‘Come!’ said Madeleine. ‘Twenty.’
There was still no response.
‘It’s not that we don’t want to,’ a voice said.
Monsieur Madeleine turned and recognized Javert. He had not noticed him before.
‘It’s a question of strength,’ Javert went on. ‘You need to be tremendously strong to lift a load like that on your back.’ With his eyes fixed upon Madeleine he said slowly: ‘I have known only one man, Monsieur Madeleine, capable of doing what you ask.’ Madeleine started. Still with his eyes upon him, Javert added casually: ‘He was a convict.’
‘Ah,’ said Madeleine.
‘In Toulon prison.’
Madeleine turned pale.
Meanwhile the cart was sinking and Père Fauchelevant was gasping and crying: ‘I’m suffocating. My ribs are breaking. For God’s sake, do something!’
Madeleine looked about him. ‘Is there no one prepared to save this man’s life for twenty louis d’or?’
No one moved. Javert repeated: ‘I have known only one man capable of doing the work of a jack. The man I mentioned.’
‘It’s crushing me,’ the old man cried.
Madeleine hesitated for another instant, met the vulture gaze of Javert, looked round at the motionless bystanders, and smiled sadly. Without a word he went on his knees and before anyone could speak was under the cart.
There was a moment of hideous uncertainty and silence. Madeleine, almost flat on his stomach beneath that terrifying weight, was seen to make two fruitless efforts to bring his elbows and knees together. A voice cried, ‘Père Madeleine, come out of there!’ Old Fauchelevent himself cried: ‘Go away, Monsieur Madeleine! I’m done for. Let me be or you’ll be killed too.’ Madeleine said nothing.
The onlookers stood breathless. The cart wheels were still sinking and it was already almost impossible for Madeleine to extricate himself.
Then suddenly the cart with its load was seen to rise slowly upward, its wheels half emerging from the quagmire. Crying in a stifled voice, ‘Hurry up! Help me!’ Madeleine made his supreme effort.
There was a sudden rush. The gallantry of a single man had lent strength and courage to all. The cart was lifted by ten pairs of arms and old Fauchelevent was saved.
Madeleine got to his feet. He was white although his face was running with sweat. His clothes were torn and caked with mud. The old man clasped him round the knees invoking the name of God. His own expression was an indescribable mingling of distress and triumph, and he gazed calmly back at Javert, who was still fixedly regarding him.
Fauchelevent had broken a knee-cap in his fall. Monsieur Madeleine had him taken to the infirmary, served by two Sisters of Mercy, which he had set up in his factory for the benefit of his workers. On the following morning the old man found a thousand-franc note on the bedside-table, with a note in Madeleine’s handwriting – ‘I am buying your horse and cart.’ The cart was damaged and the horse was dead. Fauchelevent recovered, but with a permanently stiff knee. Acting on the advice of the sisters and the curé, Madeleine got him a job as gardener in a convent in the Saint-Antoine quarter of Paris.
Shortly after this Monsieur Madeleine was elected mayor, and when for the first time Javert saw him wearing the robes which vested him with full authority over the town, a tremor went through him like that of a hound which scents a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Thereafter he avoided him whenever possible, and when his duties obliged him to have direct dealings with the mayor he addressed him in terms of the utmost formality.
In addition to the outward signs we have described of the prosperity brought to the town by Père Madeleine, there was a further indication which was not the less significant for being invisible. It was a sure sign. When people are in trouble, because work is short and trade is bad, the tax-payer uses every device to resist and evade payment, and the State is put to considerable expense to collect its dues. When on the other hand a region is prosperous and work abundant, taxes are easily paid and the cost of collecting them is small. It may be said, indeed, that the cost of tax-collection affords an infallible index of the poverty or wealth of a community. During a period of seven years this charge on the authorities in the Mon-treuil-sur-mer district had fallen by three-quarters, a fact to which the Minister of Finance, Monsieur de Villèle, made frequent reference.
Such was the state of affairs when Fantine returned to the town. No one remembered her, but fortunately the doors of Madeleine’s factory were open. She found employment in the women’s workshop. The work was new to her and she was not very good at it. Nor was the pay large but it sufficed to solve her problem; it brought her a living.
When Fantine found that she could make ends meet she had a moment of rejoicing. To be able to live by honest toil was like a blessing from Heaven. Her natural readiness to work was genuinely revived. She bought a mirror, gazed with pleasure at her youth, her beautiful hair and white teeth, forgot a great many things, dreamed only of Cosette and her plans for the future, and was almost happy. She rented a small room and furnished it on credit against her future earnings – a survival of her disorderly habits.
Not being able to claim that she was married, she was careful to say nothing about her daughter. At first, as we have seen, she was meticulous in her payments to the Thénardiers. Since she could only sign her name she had resort to a public letter-writer. She sent frequent letters, and the fact was noted. It was whispered in the women’s workshop that she ‘gave herself airs’.
No one is more avidly curious about other people’s doings than those persons whom they do not concern. Why is a certain gentleman only to be seen at dusk, and why is another always away on Thursdays? Why does so-and-so always go by the back streets? Why does a certain lady always dismiss her fiacre before reaching home, and why does she send out for note-paper when she has plenty already? And so on. There are people who are prepared to devote as much time and resources to the answering of these riddles as would suffice for a dozen good deeds; and quite gratuitously, with inquisitiveness its own reward. They will follow a person for days, keep watch at street corners and from doorways, at night, in cold and rain; they will bribe hall-porters, tip cab-drivers and lackeys, suborn chambermaids. And for what? For nothing. For the satisfaction of finding out, knowing and unravelling; from an itch to disclose. And it can happen that these broadcast secrets, mysteries exposed to the light of day, are the cause of disaster – duels, bankruptcies, ruined families, wrecked lives – to the delight of those who ‘got to the bottom of it’, from no personal interest, from instinct alone. It is a sad phenomenon.
There are persons whose malice is prompted by the sheer need to gossip. Their conversation – drawing-room chatter, antechamber asides – resembles a wide hearth of the kind that rapidly burns up logs. They need plenty of fuel, and their fuel is their neighbour.
So Fantine’s doings were observed; besides which, some of the women were jealous of her golden hair and white teeth.
It was noted by the women in the workshop that at times she turned her head to wipe away a tear. They were moments when she was suddenly reminded of her child, and perhaps also of the man she had loved; the breaking of links with the past is a painful thing.
It was discovered that she sent at least two letters a month, always to the same address, paying the postage in advance. The name of her correspondent was also discovered – Monsieur Thénardier, innkeeper at Montfermeil The letter-writer, an elderly man who could not keep his mouth shut when his stomach was filled, was plied with wine in an ale-house, and so it became known that Fantine had a child. ‘So that’s the kind of woman she is!’ A townswoman made the journey to Montfermeil, talked to Thénardier and on her return reported as follows: ‘It cost me thirty-five francs but now I know everything. I’ve seen the child.’
The lady in question was a Madame Victurnien, an inflexible guardian of public morals. She was fifty-six and bore a countenance of mingled age and ugliness, with a shaky voice and a lively mind. Strange though it may seem, she had once been young. In the year ’93 she had married a monk who had exchanged the tonsure for the red bonnet, going over from the Bernardins to the Jacobins. Dry, withered, acid, thorny, malicious, and venomous, she still lived on the memory of her departed monk, who had ruled her with a rod of iron. After the Restoration she had become a religious bigot, to the point that the priests had forgiven her her monk. She possessed a small property which she had ostentatiously bequeathed to a religious community, and she enjoyed the favour of the Bishop of Arras. This Madame Victurnien, then, went to Montfermeil and came back saying, ‘I have seen the child.’
This was the month when Thénardier, having already raised the price from seven francs to twelve, raised it again to fifteen.
Fantine’s case was hopeless. She could not leave the district because she owed money for her rent and furniture, a sum of about one hundred and fifty francs. She went and begged the workshop supervisor for money, who gave it to her but forthwith dismissed her; she had, in any case, been an indifferent worker. Overwhelmed by shame even more than by despair, she left the factory and took refuge in her room. Her fault was now known to everyone. She lacked the courage to plead her cause and did not venture to approach the mayor although she was advised to do so. The mayor, by way of the supervisor, had given her fifty francs because he was kind, and had sent her away because he was just. She accepted the verdict.
So the monk’s widow had proved her worth.
As for Monsieur Madeleine, he knew nothing whatever about the matter. Life is made up of these confusions. On principle Madeleine almost never entered the women’s workshop, having placed at its head an elderly spinster recommended to him by the curé. He had every confidence in his supervisor, a thoroughly respectable, honest woman, firm but fair-minded, imbued with the charity which is ready to give but possessing less of the charity which understands and pardons. He trusted her in everything. The best of men are often obliged to delegate their authority; and it was in the full assurance that she was acting rightly that the supervisor had tried the case of Fantine, given judgement and pronounced sentence. The fifty francs came from a fund which Monsieur Madeleine had placed at her disposal for the relief of employees in difficulties, and for which she was not required to account in detail.
Fantine tried to find work as a servant, but no one would take her. She could not leave the town. The second-hand dealer who had supplied her furniture – and such furniture! – said to her, ‘If you do I’ll have you arrested as a thief.’ Her landlord, to whom she owed rent, said, ‘You’re young and pretty, you can pay.’ She divided the fifty francs between them, returned three-quarters of the furniture, keeping only the bare essentials, and found herself without work or status, possessing nothing but a bed and still owing about a hundred francs.
She did piecework stitching of shirts for the soldiers of the garrison, which brought her in twelve sous a day. Her child cost ten sous. This was when she began to fall behind in her payments to the Thénardiers.
An old woman who lived in the house taught her the art of living in penury. There are two stages – living on little, and living on nothing. They are like two rooms, the first dark, the second pitch-black.
Fantine learned how to dispense entirely with a fire in winter, how to give up the tame bird which eats a handful of seed a day, how to turn a petticoat into a blanket and a blanket into a petticoat, and how to save candles by eating by the light from the window across the street. The rest of us have little notion of the use that a fragile being, grown old in privation and honesty, can make of a single sou. It becomes a talent in the end, one that Fantine acquired and with it a regrowth of courage.
She said to her neighbour: ‘Well, what I say is, if I only sleep five hours a night and work the rest of the time I can just about earn enough to live on. And when you’re unhappy you eat less. So what with work and not much food on the one hand, and grieving on the other, I can keep alive.’
To have had her child with her in her distress would have been happiness of a kind. She thought of sending for her. But was she to make her share her own destitution? And then, she owed money to Thénardier. How was that debt to be paid, and how pay the cost of the journey?
The old spinster who had instructed her in what may be termed the art of poverty was named Marguerite. She was truly devout, poor herself and charitable not only to the poor but also to the rich, just sufficiently educated to be able to sign her name ‘Margueritte’, and firm in her trust in God, which is the root of wisdom. There are many such virtuous souls in the depths who will one day rise higher; they are lives which have a tomorrow.
At first Fantine had been so overcome by shame that she had been afraid to leave the house. She felt in the streets that everyone looked at her; the heads turned but no one greeted her; and this ostracism pierced her like a keen wind, body and soul. In a small town the fallen woman is as it were exposed naked to the scorn and prying eyes of all-comers. In Paris she is at least unknown, and her anonymity is a garment. Fantine would have given all she possessed to be able to take refuge in Paris, but it was impossible. She had to learn to endure disdain as she learned to accustom herself to penury, and by degrees she did so. In two or three months she had shrugged off her shame and went about as though nothing had happened, pretending not to care. She came and went with her head held high and a bitter smile on her lips, and felt that she was becoming brazen.
Madame Victurnien, seeing her pass beneath her window and noting the wretched condition of the ‘creature’ who thanks to her public spirit had been ‘put in her place’, was highly gratified. The cruel of heart have their own black happiness.
Excess of work exhausted Fantine, and the small, dry cough from which she suffered grew worse. She said sometimes to Marguerite, ‘Feel how hot my hands are.’
But in the mornings, combing with a broken comb the hair that flowed like silk over her shoulders, she still had moments of happy vanity.
Fantine had been dismissed at the end of the winter. She survived the summer, but then came the next winter, shorter days and shorter working hours. Winter! No warmth, no light, no midday, morning merging into evening, fog, twilight, and nothing to be clearly seen through the misted window. The sky had become a grating, the day a cellar, the sun a poor man at the door. The terrible winter season, which turns the rain from Heaven and the hearts of men to stone! Fantine’s creditors were harassing her.
She could not earn enough and her debts grew. The Thénardiers bombarded her with letters, heartrending in tone and ominous in their exactions. They wrote to say that Cosette was obliged to go almost naked in the cold and that at least ten francs were needed to buy her a woollen dress. Receiving this letter, Fantine carried it crumpled in her hand throughout the day, and in the evening went to the barber at the corner of the street and withdrew her comb, letting her fair hair fall down to her waist.
‘Such beautiful hair!’ said the barber.
‘What will you give me for it?’ she asked.
‘Ten francs.’
‘Then cut it off.’
She bought a woollen dress and sent it to the Thénardiers, who were furious. The money was what they wanted. They gave the dress to their daughter Éponine, and the little lark, Cosette, went on shivering.
‘My daughter’s not cold any more,’ thought Fantine. ‘I have dressed her in my hair.’ She wore small mob-caps to hide her shorn head and still looked pretty.
But a dark change was taking place within her. Now that she could no longer do up her hair she conceived a hatred for all mankind. She had long shared the universal veneration for Père Madeleine, but now, by dint of telling herself that he had dismissed her and was the cause of all her troubles, she came to hate him more than any man. When she passed the factory gates at the time when the workers were waiting to be let in she affected to sing and laugh derisively, which caused one old woman to remark, ‘There’s a wench that’ll come to a bad end.’
In a spirit of defiance, and with fury in her heart, she took a lover, a chance acquaintance for whom she cared nothing. He was some sort of travelling musician, indolent and feckless. He beat her and finally left her, as repelled as she was herself.
But still she worshipped her child. The deeper she sank, the darker the shades that closed about her, the more radiant did that vision appear. ‘Someday I’ll be rich and have Cosette with me,’ she said to herself, and this alone could cause her to smile. The cough did not get better and she had night sweats.
The following letter came from the Thénardiers:
‘Cosette has caught the disease that is sweeping through the region, what they call a miliary fever. The medicine is very expensive. It is ruining us and we can no longer pay. If you do not send us forty francs within a week the child will die.’
This caused Fantine to burst into hysterical laughter, and she said to Marguerite:
‘How wonderful! A mere forty francs! Two napoléons. Where do they expect me to get them? Are they mad?’
She re-read the letter standing by a window on the landing, and then, still laughing, ran downstairs and out into the street. To someone who asked what she found so funny she replied:
‘A silly joke in a letter I’ve just had from some country people. They want forty francs from me, the poor, ignorant peasants!’
Crossing the market-square she saw a crowd gathered round a strangely shaped vehicle from which a man clad in red was addressing them. He was an itinerant dentist selling sets of false teeth, opiates, powders, and elixirs. Drawing closer, Fantine joined in the laughter at his oratory, in which slang for the common people was interlarded with highflown language for the well-to-do; and seeing her laugh, the dentist cried:
‘You’ve got a fine set of teeth, my lass. If you’d care to sell me your two incisors I’ll pay you a gold napoléon for each.’
‘What are my incisors?’
‘Your two top front teeth.’
‘How horrible!’ exclaimed Fantine.
‘Two napoléons,’ grumbled a toothless old woman standing near. ‘She’s in luck!’
Fantine fled, covering her ears to shut out the man’s hoarse voice as he shouted after her:
‘Think it over, my girl. Two napoléons are worth having. If you change your mind you’ll find me this evening at the Tillac d’argent.’
Fantine ran home in a fury of indignation and told Marguerite what had happened.
‘Would you believe it! The abominable man – how can they allow such creatures to travel round the country? He wanted to pull my two front teeth out. I should be hideous! Hair grows again, but not teeth. Oh, the monster! I’d sooner throw myself out of a top-storey window. He said he’d be at the Tillac d’argent this evening.’
‘How much did he say he’d pay?’ asked Marguerite.
‘Two napoléons.’
‘Yes,’ said Fantine. ‘That’s forty francs.’
She went thoughtfully on with her work. After a quarter of an hour she stopped sewing and went on to the landing to re-read the Thénardiers’ letter. She returned and said to Marguerite:
‘What is this miliary fever? Have you heard of it?’
‘Yes,’ said the old woman. ‘It’s an illness.’
‘Does it need a lot of medicine?’
‘Yes, very strong medicine.’
‘How do you get it?’
‘It’s just an illness that you catch.’
‘And children catch it?’
‘Especially children.’
‘Do they die of it?’
‘Very often,’ said Marguerite.
Fantine left the room and went on to the landing to read the letter again. That evening she went out and was seen hurrying in the direction of the Rue de Paris, where the inns are.
When Marguerite entered Fantine’s room next morning, doing so before daybreak because they always worked together and thus could share a candle, she found her seated cold and shivering on her bed. She had not been to bed. She was sitting with her bonnet on her knees, and the candle, which had been burning all night, was almost burned away.
Standing horror-stricken in the doorway, Marguerite cried:
‘Heavens! You’ve used up a whole candle! What has happened?’
Fantine turned her cropped head towards her, and it seemed that she had aged ten years overnight.
‘Lord preserve usl’ cried Marguerite. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing is the matter with me,’ said Fantine. ‘I’m happy. My baby isn’t going to the of that dreadful disease for lack of medicine.’
She pointed to two napoléons that lay gleaming on the table.
‘A fortune,’ murmured Marguerite. ‘A fortune! Where did you get them?’
‘I earned them,’ said Fantine.
She smiled as she said it, and the candle lighted her face. It was a bloodstained smile. There were flecks of blood at the corners of her mouth and a wide gap beneath her upper lip.
She sent the forty francs to Montfermeil.
Needless to say, the Thénardiers were lying. Cosette was not ill.
Fantine threw away her mirror. She had long since exchanged her small room on the second floor for an attic under the sloping roof, against the beams of which she constantly bumped her head. Paupers cannot reach the end of their abode, or of their destiny, except by crouching ever lower. She no longer possessed a bed but only a mattress on the floor, a tattered blanket and a rickety chair. A potted rose in one corner of the room had died of neglect. In another corner was a butter-tub which served as a water bucket; the water froze in winter, and its different levels were marked during long periods by rings of ice. She had lost all shame and was losing all personal pride. She wore soiled bonnets in the street and, from lack of time or from indifference, no longer mended her undergarments. As the heels of her stockings wore out she stuffed the stockings down into her shoes, a fact which was apparent from their wrinkles. She patched her old, worn stays with fragments of calico which tore at the least strain. The people to whom she owed money allowed her no peace, making scenes in the street and on the stairway. She spent whole nights in tears and brooding, her eyes over bright and with a constant pain in her back, at the top of her left shoulder-blade. She coughed a great deal. Profoundly hating Père Madeleine, she uttered no complaint against him. She stitched seventeen hours a day; but a contractor for prison labour, who was able to get the work done more cheaply, brought the free workers’ daily wage down to nine sous. Nine sous for seventeen hours work! Her creditors became more insatiable than ever, the second-hand dealer, who had got back nearly all his furniture, never stopped badgering her. In God’s name, what more could she do? Feeling hunted, she developed some of the instincts of a wild beast. And then Thénardier wrote to say that his patience was at an end and that if she did not send a hundred francs forthwith he would be obliged to turn Cosette out into the street, still convalescent after her grave illness, to fend for herself amid the rigours of the season and live or the as the case might be.
A hundred francs! In what calling was it possible to earn a hundred sous a day? There was only one. ‘Well,’ thought Fantine, ‘I may as well sell the rest.’
She became a prostitute.
What is the true story of Fantine? It is the story of society’s purchase of a slave. A slave purchased from poverty, hunger, cold, loneliness, defencelessness, destitution. A squalid bargain: a human soul for a hunk of bread. Poverty offers and society accepts.
Our society is governed by the precepts of Jesus Christ but is not yet imbued with them. We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.
It afflicts women, that is to say, it preys on grace, frailty, beauty, motherhood. It is not the least of man’s shames.
At the sad point which our tale has now reached there is nothing left of the girl who was once Fantine. In becoming dirt, she has been turned to stone. To touch her is to feel a chill. She submits to and ignores the customer; she is the unmoving countenance of the dishonoured. Life and the social order have said their last word to her; everything has happened to her that can happen. She has known everything, borne and suffered everything, lost everything and shed her last tear. She is resigned with the resignation that resembles indifference as death resembles sleep. She no longer seeks to escape from anything, nor does she fear anything. Let the heavens fall, let the tides of the sea engulf her, and what can it matter, she has had her fill.
Or so she believes, but it is an error to suppose that we can ever exhaust Fate or reach the end of anything. What is the riddle of these countless scattered destinies, whither are they bound, why are they as they are?
He who knows the answer to this knows all things. He is alone. His name is God.
In every small town, and this was particularly so in Montreuil-sur-mer, there is a class of young men who squander an income of fifteen hundred francs in the provinces much as their peers in Paris squander an income of two hundred thousand. They belong to the great species of neuters, the geldings, parasites, nonentities who own a little land, a little silliness, and a little wit; who would look like clods in a fashionable salon but think themselves gentlemen in a tavern; who talk about ‘my fields and my peasants’, who boo actresses in the theatre to prove themselves men of taste, pick quarrels with the officers of the garrison to prove that they are men of spirit, shoot, smoke, yawn, drink, smell of tobacco, play billiards, watch the travellers descending from the stage-coach, live in the café, dine at the inn, own a dog which eats scraps under the table and a mistress who sets the dishes on top of it, watch their pennies, carry current fashions to the extreme, patronize the drama, despise women, wear out their old boots, copy London by way of Paris and Paris by way of Pont-à-Mousson, and grow old and feeble-minded having never worked or served any purpose or done any great harm.
Monsieur Félix Tholomyès, had he stayed in the provinces and never come to Paris, would have been one of these.
Richer, they would be called bucks or fops; poorer, they would be vagabonds. They are simply idlers, boring or bored or daydreaming idlers, with a few wags among them.
At that period a fop sported a high collar, a spreading cravat, a watch with a fob, three superimposed waistcoats of different colours, the blue and the red being underneath, a high-waisted, olive-coloured, fish-tailed coat with a double row of silver buttons sewn close together and rising up to the shoulders, and trousers of a lighter olive adorned with pleats on either side, always an equal number ranging from one to eleven, this limit being never exceeded. To which may be added low boots with metal heelcaps, a narrow-brimmed tall hat, a very large cane and conversation sparkling with witticisms borrowed from Potier of the Théâtre des Variétés. Above all, spurs and a moustache. The moustache in those days was the hallmark of a civilian, the spurs were the mark of a pedestrian. The provincial fop wore longer spurs and a bushier moustache.
It was the period of the struggle of the South American republics against Spain, of Bolívar against Morillo. The narrow-brimmed hats, indicative of monarchist sympathies, were called morillos. Liberals wore broad-brimmed hats called bolivars.
Some eight or ten months after the events just recorded, on a snowy evening at the beginning of January 1824, one of these elegant idlers, a gentleman of orthodox opinions, for he was wearing a morillo and was in addition warmly clad in the sort of greatcoat that completed the fashionable costume in cold weather, was exercising his wit at the expense of a woman in a low-cut evening-gown with flowers in her hair who was prowling to and fro outside the officers’ café.
The gentleman was smoking, this being highly fashionable. Each time the woman passed, he blew a cloud of smoke in her direction and favoured her with a fresh sally reflecting on her looks, her attire and anything else that occurred to him. The name of the gentleman was Monsieur Bamatabois. The woman, a sad and garish ghost coming and going through the snow, paid no attention to him, but with the sombre resignation of a soldier condemned to a flogging, continued her silent patrol, which every few minutes brought her within range of his sarcasms. Finding that he was producing no effect, the gentleman got to his feet, crept up behind her, scooped up a handful of snow and thrust it down her back between her bare shoulders. The woman uttered a cry and, turning, sprang at him like a tigress, ripping his face with her finger-nails and screaming at him in language that might have shocked an army sergeant. The stream of obscenities, uttered in a voice coarsened by cheap brandy, poured hideously out of a gap-toothed mouth. The woman was Fantine.
The noise brought the officers running out of the café. A circle of laughing, hooting, applauding spectators formed round this whirlwind composed of two creatures whom it was difficult to recognize as a man and a woman, the man seeking to defend himself with his hat knocked off, the woman hitting, kicking, and screaming, frenzied and horrible.
Suddenly a tall man broke through the circle, seized the woman by her mud-stained satin corsage and said, ‘You come along with me.’ The woman looked round and was abruptly silent. Her eyes went glassy, and from being livid with fury she became pale and trembling with alarm. She had recognized Javert.
Monsieur Bamatabois took advantage of the interruption to hurry away.
Thrusting aside the onlookers, Javert made rapidly for the police post on the far side of the square, dragging the unhappy woman with him. She made no resistance. Neither spoke a word. The spectators followed, hooting with delight. The utmost extremity of degradation is the obscene merriment to which it gives rise.
The police post was a low room, heated by a stove, with a barred, glass-panelled door opening on to the street. After entering with Fantine, Javert shut this door behind him, to the great disappointment of the sightseers, who stood on tiptoe and craned their necks in their effort to follow the proceedings. Curiosity is a form of gluttony: to see is to devour.
Fantine crouched down in a corner of the room, motionless and silent, huddled like a frightened animal The duty-sergeant placed a lighted candle on the table. Javert seated himself at it, and getting a sheet of officially-stamped paper out of his pocket began to write.
Under present laws women of this class are wholly at the mercy of the police. The police can do with them what they like, punish them as they see fit and, if they choose, deprive them of those two sad possessions which they term their calling and their liberty. Javert was quite impassive, his sober expression betraying no emotion. But the fact is that he was gravely and deeply exercised in his mind. This was one of those cases where he must use his formidable discretionary powers without resort to any higher authority, but with all the scruples dictated by his own rigid conscience. His office chair at that moment was a seat of justice before which the case must be tried, judgement delivered, and sentence pronounced. He summoned all the powers of his mind, all his principles, to deal with this weighty matter, and the more he studied it the more outrageous did he find it. What he had witnessed was undeniably a crime. He had seen society, in the person of a landowner and voter, insulted and attacked in the street by a creature outside society. A prostitute had assaulted a citizen. He, Javert, had seen it with his own eyes. He wrote on in silence.
When he had finished writing he signed the document, folded it and, handing it to the duty-sergeant, said: ‘Have this woman taken to the gaol under guard.’ He then turned to Fantine and said: ‘You’re getting six months.’
She uttered a cry of despair. ‘Six months. Six months in prison, earning seven sous a day! But what about Cosette? What about my daughter? And I still owe more than a hundred francs to the Thénardiers, Monsieur l’inspecteur – did you know that?’
Without getting to her feet she dragged herself across the floor, muddied as it was by the boots of many men, shuffling hastily on her knees with her hands clasped.
‘Monsieur Javert, I beg you to be merciful. It was not my fault. If you had seen how it started you would know. I swear by God it was not my fault. The gentleman, I don’t know who he was, put snow down my back. Has anyone the right to put snow down a person’s back when they’re just walking past, doing no harm? It gave me a shock. I’m not very well, you see. And then he’d been saying unpleasant things to me, how ugly I was and about my having lost my teeth, as if I didn’t know. I didn’t answer, I just thought, well if it amuses him, and I walked quietly on and that was when he put the snow down my back. Monsieur Javert, is there no one who saw what happened and can tell you? I was wrong to lose my temper but when a thing like that happens, something ice-cold pushed down your back when you aren’t expecting it, you forget yourself, you lose control. I shouldn’t have damaged the gentleman’s hat. But why did he have to run away? I’d have apologized – good God, I don’t mind apologizing! Oh, let me off just this once, Monsieur Javert. I don’t suppose you know, but all one can earn in prison is seven sous a day. It’s not the Government’s fault but that’s all it is, seven sous, and I owe a hundred francs and if I don’t pay my little girl will be turned out into the street. God help me, I can’t have her with me, the life I lead. What will become of the poor mite? It’s those people, those innkeepers, the Thénardiers, they aren’t fair, they aren’t reasonable, all they want is money. Don’t send me to prison! They’ll turn her out into the street, a child, at this time of year, mid-winter, you’ve got to think of that, Monsieur Javert. If she was older she could earn her living, but not at her age. I’m not really a bad woman. It isn’t idleness or greed that has made me what I am. I drink eau-de-vie, but from sheer misery, not because I like it but it dulls the mind. If you’d looked in my wardrobe when things were going better for me you’d have seen that I wasn’t just a light woman leading a disorderly life. I had clean, decent linen, plenty of it. Have pity on me, Monsieur Javert!’
She crouched there with her bosom half-bared, hands clasped together, face wet with tears while the words poured out in a low, heartrending flow broken by that small, dry cough. The extremity of grief sheds its own awful radiance to transform even the most abject. At that moment, bending forward to press the hem of the policeman’s greatcoat to her lips, Fantine was beautiful again. She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.
‘Well,’ said Javert, ‘I’ve listened to you. Is that all you have to say? Then off you go. You’re getting six months, and the Eternal Father himself can’t alter it.’
The solemn mention of the Eternal Father forced her to realize that the sentence was final. She collapsed on the floor moaning:
‘Mercy!’
Javert turned his back on her and two policemen took her by the arms.
A few minutes previously a man had entered unobserved. Closing the door behind him he had remained with his back to it listening to Fantine’s despairing plea. Now, while the men were trying to drag her to her feet, he emerged from the shadows and said:
‘One moment, if you please.’
Javert looked round and saw that it was Monsieur Madeleine. Removing his hat, he bowed stiffly.
‘I beg your pardon, Monsieur le maire.’
The words had a remarkable effect on Fantine. Rising instantly from the floor like a ghost emerging from the earth, she thrust aside the two men and, before they could stop her, had planted herself fiery-eyed in front of Madeleine.
‘So you’re the mayor, are you?’
She laughed and spat in his face.
Monsieur Madeleine wiped his cheek and said:
‘Inspector Javert, this woman is to go free.’
Javert felt for a moment that he was going mad. He was beset by a confusion of the most violent emotions he had ever experienced in his life. To see a woman of the town spit in the face of the mayor was a thing so monstrous that even in his wildest imaginings he would not have dared to think it possible. And at the same time at the back of his mind he had an obscure sense of some kind of hideous connection between the woman and this man who was mayor which, to his horror, made the act intelligible. But when he saw the mayor, the magistrate, calmly wipe his face and heard him say that the woman was to go free, stupefaction overwhelmed him. Thought and words both failed him. He had passed beyond the bounds of amazement and could say nothing.
Fantine was no less astounded. Reaching out a bare arm, she clung to the nearest object available for her support – it was in fact the handle operating the damper of the stove – and staring about her began to talk in a low voice as though to herself.
‘To go free! Not to spend six months in prison. But who said it? No one can have said it. I must have misheard. It couldn’t have been that monster, the mayor. Did you say it, good Monsieur Javert, did you say that I was to go free? Look, I’ll explain everything and then you will let me go. It was all the fault of that vile creature, the mayor. He dismissed me because of the things some of the women said. Wasn’t that abominable, to turn away an honest working-girl? So then I couldn’t earn enough, and that was the trouble. There’s something the police should do, Monsieur Javert; they should prevent the prison contractors from injuring the poor. What I mean is this, you’re earning twelve sous a day stitching shirts, and then it’s cut down to nine and you can’t earn enough to live on. So then you have to do what you can. I had Cosette to think of, so I was forced to become a bad woman. You do see, don’t you, that it was that monster the mayor who was at the bottom of it all? And then I knocked the gentleman’s hat off outside the officers’ café, but he’d ruined my dress with his snow, and we girls, we only have one silk dress for evenings. Truly, I’ve never meant to harm anyone and I know plenty of women worse than me who are much better off. You did say, didn’t you, Monsieur Javert, that I can go? You can ask people about me, you can ask my landlord, I’m paying regularly now, they’ll tell you I’m honest … Oh, I’m sorry, I moved the damper and the stove is smoking.’
Monsieur Madeleine had listened to this with deep attention. While she was speaking he had got out his purse, opened it and found that it was empty. Putting it back in his pocket he said:
‘How much did you say you owed?’
Fantine, whose words had been addressed solely to Javert, swung round upon him.
‘Am I talking to you?’
She said to the other men, ‘You saw me spit in his face, didn’t you?’ and then to Madeleine, ‘You brute of a mayor, you’ve come here to frighten me, but I’m not afraid of you. I’m only afraid of Monsieur Javert, good Monsieur Javert.’
She turned back to the inspector.
‘The thing is, we’ve got to be fair, haven’t we? I know you’re fair, Monsieur Javert. After all, it didn’t amount to anything. A man puts a little snow down a girl’s back and it makes the officers laugh – well, they’ve got to have their fun and after all that’s what we girls are for. But then you come along and it’s your duty to keep order so you take away the girl who’s making trouble, but then, thinking it over, and because you’re kind, you decide to let me go, because of my little girl, because if I spend six months in prison I shouldn’t be able to keep her alive. “But mind you don’t come back, my wench!” you say to me. Oh, but I won’t, Monsieur Javert, I won’t; they can treat me how they like, I’ll not do a thing! Only this time, you see, it hurt me, that lump of snow that I wasn’t expecting, and so I lost my temper. I’m not very well, like I said, I cough a lot and it’s as though I had a lump burning inside me. It’s just here, you can feel for yourself, don’t be afraid.’
She was no longer weeping and her voice was gentle. Taking Javert’s large, rough hand she pressed it smiling against the whiteness of her throat. Then with sudden, rapid movements she repaired the disorder of her dress, shook out the folds of her skirt which had mounted almost to her knee, turned and marched to the door, saying with a friendly nod to the gendarmes:
‘The inspector says I can go, so now I’m going.’
She had a hand on the latch and in another instant would have been in the street.
Until that moment Javert had stood motionless staring at the floor, a mere incident in the scene, like a statue that has not yet been put in place. But the sound of the latch aroused him from his stupor. He looked up sharply with that air of aggressive authority which is the more pronounced at the lower levels, the ferocity of a wild beast, which is atrocious in a small man.
‘Sergeant,’ he cried, ‘can’t you see the woman’s walking out? Who said you could let her go?’
‘I did,’ said Madeleine.
At the sound of Javert’s voice Fantine had started back, letting go the latch as though she had been caught in the act of stealing it. When Madeleine spoke she turned to look at him, and from then on, without uttering a word and scarcely daring to draw breath, she gazed in turn from Madeleine to Javert and back, according to which of them was speaking.
Javert must clearly have been thrown quite off balance, as the saying is, for him to have barked at the sergeant as he had done after being instructed by the mayor to let Fantine go free. Had he positively forgotten that the mayor was present? Had he concluded in his own mind that it was impossible for anyone in authority to give such an order, and that the mayor had spoken in error? Or had he decided, in view of the monstrous happenings of the past hour, that the time had come when a supreme gesture must be made, when the bloodhound must turn magistrate, the police-officer assume the robes of justice, and that in this moment of utmost crisis, law and order, morality, government, the whole of society, were personified in himself, Javert?
Be that as it may, when Monsieur Madeleine spoke the words ‘I did’, police-inspector Javert was seen to turn towards him, pallid and blue-lipped, his whole body seized with a faint tremor, and with lowered eyes but in a firm voice he was heard to make the unprecedented reply:
‘Monsieur le maire, that cannot be allowed.’
‘Why not?’ asked Monsieur Madeleine.
‘The woman insulted a respectable citizen.’
‘Listen to me, Inspector Javert,’ Madeleine said in a calm, conciliatory voice. ‘I know you to be an honourable man and I am very ready to explain my actions to you. This is the truth of the matter. I was crossing the square when you took the woman away. There were still people about and I asked what had happened. I heard the whole story. The respectable citizen was at fault, and by the letter of the law it was he who should have been arrested.’
Javert persisted: ‘But she has insulted you too, the mayor of this town!’
‘That is my affair,’ said Madeleine. ‘An insult to me may be said to be my property. I can do what I like with it.’
‘If you’ll forgive me, Monsieur le maire, the insult was not to yourself but to justice.’
‘Conscience is the highest justice, Inspector Javert. I heard what the woman said. I know what I’m doing.’
‘As for me, Monsieur le maire, I can’t believe my ears.’
‘Then you must be content to obey.’
‘I have to do my duty. Duty requires me to send her to prison for six months.’
Monsieur Madeleine said gently: ‘You must be quite clear about this. She will not serve a single day in prison.’
The peremptory words emboldened Javert to look Madeleine full in the face. He said, still in a tone of profound respect:
‘It distresses me deeply to take issue with Monsieur le maire. Nothing of the kind has ever happened to me before. But I must venture to remind Monsieur le maire that I am acting within the terms of my authority. We will confine ourselves to the matter of the citizen, since Monsieur le maire prefers it I was there. The woman flung herself on Monsieur Bamatabois, who is a citizen on the electoral roll and owner of the handsome house at the end of the esplanade, a three-storey stone house. Strange things happen in this world, but this is a matter of police regulations and comes within my province. I am holding the woman Fantine.’
At this Monsieur Madeleine folded his arms and said in a voice that had never before been heard in the town:
‘The regulations you refer to are those affecting the Municipal Police. Under articles Nine, Eleven, Fifteen and Sixty-six of the Criminal Code I have authority over them. I order you to release this woman.’
Javert made a last effort.
‘But, Monsieur le maire –’
‘And let me also remind you of Article Eighty-one of the Law of 13 December 1799, dealing with arbitrary detention.’
‘Allow me, Monsieur le maire –’
‘That’s enough.’
‘But-’
‘Kindly leave the post,’ said Monsieur Madeleine.
Javert received this body-blow standing as rigidly as a Russian soldier. Bowing low to the mayor, he turned and left. Fantine moved away from the door to let him pass and stared at him in stupefaction as he did so.
She too had undergone a strange upheaval. She had found herself to be in some sort an object of dispute between two opposed powers. She had witnessed a conflict between two men who held her liberty in their hands, her very life and that of her child; one had sought to drag her deeper into darkness, the other to restore her to light. The two contestants, in the heightened vision of her terror, had seemed like giants, one speaking with the voice of a demon, the other in the tones of an angel. The angel had won, and what caused her to tremble from head to foot was the fact that this rescuing angel was the man she abhorred, the abominable mayor whom for so long she had regarded as the author of her troubles. He had saved her after she had most outrageously insulted him! Could she have been wrong? Must she now change her very heart? … She did not know and stood trembling, listening in turmoil, gazing with distracted eyes, and feeling with every word that Monsieur Madeleine spoke the knot of hatred dissolve within her, while a new feeling took its place, heartwarming and inexpressible, a sense of deliverance, trust, and love.
After Javert had gone, Monsieur Madeleine turned to her and spoke slowly and with difficulty, in the accents of an earnest man moved nearly to tears.
‘I heard what you said. None of it was known to me, but I believe it to be true, I feel that it is true. I did not even know that you had left my employment. Why did you not appeal to me? No matter. I will pay your debts and arrange for your child to be brought here or else for you to go to her. You will live here or in Paris or where you choose. You need not work if you don’t want to. I will see to it that you have what money you need. You will become honest again in being happy again. But let me assure you of this, that if it has all been as you say – and I do not doubt it – then you have never been anything but virtuous and chaste in the eyes of God. My poor girl!’
And this was more than Fantine could bear. To have Cosette! To escape from her present life. To be free and cared for, happy and honest, with Cosette. This prospect of paradise in the depths of her misery was too much for her. She could only gaze mutely at the man addressing her and utter little whimpering cries – oh – oh – oh … Her legs gave way beneath her; she fell on her knees before Monsieur Madeleine and before he could prevent it had taken his hand and pressed it to her lips.
Then she fainted.