NOT ALL the events which follow became known in Montreuil-sur-mer, but the scanty report of them which reached the town created so great a stir that we are bound to describe them in detail. The reader will find among them two or three improbable circumstances which we record in the interest of truth.
During the afternoon following his interview with Javert, Monsieur Madeleine paid his customary visit to Fantine. Before doing so he asked to see Sister Simplice, one of the two nursing sisters of the order of St Lazarus who did duty in his infirmary, the other being Sister Perpetua.
Sister Perpetua was a plain countrywoman who had entered the service of God as she might have entered any other service, becoming a nun as she might become a cook. Such people are by no means rare, and the religious orders make no bones about accepting this raw material which can readily be shaped into a Capucine or an Ursuline. Their function is to do the rough work. The transition from farm-worker to Carmelite is an easy one, calling for no great effort; village and cloister share a common ground of ignorance which puts the countryman on a level with the monk. A few added folds turn the peasant smock into a cassock. Sister Perpetua, who came from Marines, near Pontoise, was a sturdy, patois-speaking, psalm-singing, grumbling servant of the Church who sugared the tisane according to her opinion of the sufferer, rebuked the sick and scolded the dying, almost flinging God in their faces, castigating their death-throes with angry, florid, honest and forthright prayers.
To compare Sister Simplice and her wax-like pallor with Sister Perpetua was like comparing a taper with a church candle. Vincent de Paul has beautifully depicted the Sister of Mercy in words that express both her freedom and her servitude. ‘Their only convent is the sick-room, their only cell a hired lodging, their chapel the parish church, their cloister the streets of the town or the hospital ward, their discipline obedience, their shelter the fear of God and their veil, modesty.’ This ideal was in Sister Simplice a living reality. No one knew her age; she had never been young and it seemed that she would never grow old. She was a calm and austere person – we can Hardly say ‘woman’ – companionable but remote, who had never told a lie. She was so gentle as to seem fragile, but possessed a steely strength. She laid charmed fingers, slender and chaste, on the sufferer, and there was as it were a silence in her speech; she never spoke an unnecessary word and the sound of her voice would have graced a confessional or delighted a drawing-room. Her delicacy had adapted itself to the rough serge gown she wore, which served her as a constant reminder of Heaven. We must stress one particular. The fact that she never lied, had never spoken, for any reason or without reason, a word that was not strictly true, was the distinctive characteristic of Sister Simplice, the keynote of her virtue. Her unshakeable truthfulness had made her almost celebrated in the community, and Abbé Sicard refers to it in a letter to the deaf-mute Massieu. However honest and incorruptible the rest of us may be, our candour is always flawed by, here and there, some small, innocent falsehood. But it was not so with her. Can there be such a thing as a white lie, a little lie? The lie is the absolute of evil There can be no small lie; who lies, lies wholly. The lie is the devil’s own face. Satan has two names; he is Satan and he is Untruth. That is what Sister Simplice believed, the belief she practised; and it was the source of the purity which shone from her, even from her lips and eyes. Her smile was pure and her gaze was pure; there was no cobweb or any grain of dust on the unsullied mirror of that conscience. Upon entering the order of St Vincent de Paul she had chosen the name Simplice in memory of the saint who had let her breasts be torn off rather than say she had been born at Segesta when her birthplace was Syracuse – a lie which would have saved her.*
Sister Simplice, when she entered the order, had two weaknesses which she gradually corrected: she liked sweets and she enjoyed getting letters. Her only reading was a book of Latin prayers in large print. She did not understand Latin, but she understood the book.
She had conceived an affection for Fantine, no doubt perceiving the virtue latent within her, and had taken her almost wholly in her own charge.
Monsieur Madeleine took Sister Simplice aside and recommended Fantine to her care in a tone so earnest that later she was to remember it. Then he went in to see Fantine.
Fantine awaited his daily visits as we await warmth and happiness. She said to the sisters: ‘I’m only alive when the mayor is here.’
On this day she had a high fever. Directly she saw him she asked:
‘And Cosette?’
He answered, smiling: ‘Very soon.’
His manner towards her was normal except that he stayed an hour instead of his usual half-hour, much to her delight. He stressed to everyone concerned that she must go short of nothing, and at one moment his face was seen to grow very sombre. But this was explained when it became known that the doctor had murmured to him that she was sinking fast.
Then he returned to the mairie where his clerk saw him carefully studying a road-map of France that hung in his office. He pencilled some figures on a sheet of paper.
From the mairie, Madeleine crossed the town to call upon a Fleming named Scaufflaer (French: Scaufflaire) who hired out horses and ‘carriages if required’. The shortest way to his establishment was along a little-frequented street in which was the presbytery of Madeleine’s own parish. The curé was said to be a worthy man and a wise counsellor. There was only one person in the street when Madeleine passed the presbytery, and this person happened to notice that after doing so he stopped, stood for a moment motionless and then, turning back, made for the presbytery door which had an iron knocker. He quickly seized hold of the knocker and raised it; but again he paused as though in thought and, after a few moments, instead of knocking, gently released it and continued on his way rather more rapidly than before.
He found Scaufflaire mending a piece of harness.
‘Master Scaufflaire,’ he asked, ‘have you a good horse?’
‘All my horses are good, Monsieur le maire,’ answered the Fleming. ‘What exactly do you mean?’
‘I want a horse that can do twenty leagues in a day.’
‘Twenty leagues! Harnessed to a chaise?’
‘And how much rest will it get at the end of it?’
‘It will have to come back the next day.’
‘The same distance?’
‘Yes.’
‘Love us and save us! A whole twenty leagues?’
Madeleine produced the scrap of paper on which he had jotted down the figures 5, 6, and 8 ½.
‘Nineteen and a half, to be exact. Call it twenty.’
‘Well, Monsieur le maire,’ said the Fleming, ‘I’ve got what you want, a small white horse from the Bas-Boulonnais, a wonderful animal. They tried to make him into a saddle-horse but he threw all his riders and no one could manage him. But I bought him and put him between shafts, and it turned out that that was what he wanted – gentle as a girl and goes like the wind, provided you don’t try to get on his back. He’ll pull but he won’t carry. Everyone has their own ideas, and he seems to have got that one firmly in his head.’
‘And he’ll last the course?’
‘Forty miles? He’ll do it at a steady trot in under eight hours, provided –’
‘Provided what?’
‘Well, in the first place, he must have an hour’s breather half-way, and you must keep an eye on him while he’s eating to make sure the stable-boy doesn’t steal the oats. The thing I’ve found, stopping at inns, is that more oats get drunk by the stable-boys than eaten by the horses.’
‘I’ll see to that.’
‘Secondly – I take it the chaise is for yourself, Monsieur le maire, and that you know how to drive?’
‘Yes.’
‘You must travel alone and without baggage, to keep down the weight.’
‘Certainly.’
‘The charge will be thirty francs a day, including rest-days. I won’t take a penny less, and you will pay for the animal’s feed.’
Monsieur Madeleine got three napoleons out of his purse and laid them on the table.
‘There’s two days in advance.’
‘One last thing,’ said Master Scaufflaire, ‘a chaise would be too heavy for this trip. I must ask Monsieur le maire to use my tilbury.’
‘Mark you, it’s entirely open.’
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘Have you considered, Monsieur le maire, that this is winter and that the weather’s extremely cold?’ Madeleine made no reply to this, and the Fleming added: ‘Or that it may rain?’
Monsieur Madeleine merely said:
‘I want the horse and tilbury to be outside my door at four-thirty tomorrow morning.’
‘Very well,’ said Scaufflaire. He scratched with a finger-nail at a small stain on the surface of the table and said in the off-hand manner with which the Flemish disguise their perspicacity:
‘It occurs to me, Monsieur le maire, that I still don’t know exactly where you’re going.’
He had been thinking of nothing else since the beginning of the interview, but for some reason had not ventured to put the question directly.
‘Is this horse strong in the forelegs?’ asked Madeleine.
‘Yes, although you’ll need to hold him up a little on the down-slopes. Will there be many down-slopes on this journey, Monsieur le maire?’
‘Please be sure to have it round at my house punctually at half past four,’ said Madeleine, and went out, leaving the Fleming ‘flabbergasted’, as he later said.
But a few minutes later the mayor returned, still with the same impenetrable, preoccupied manner.
‘Monsieur Scaufflaire, what value do you put on your horse-and-tilbury, taking the two together?’
‘Or rather, one in front of the other,’ said the Fleming, attempting a joke.
‘Well?’
‘Do I understand that Monsieur le maire is proposing to buy them?’
‘No, but I wish to insure you against possible loss or injury. You will repay the money when I bring them back. How much?’
‘Five hundred francs, Monsieur le maire.’
‘Here you are.’
Monsieur Madeleine laid a banknote on the table and again departed, this time not to return. Master Scaufflaire now bitterly regretted not having said a thousand. In fact, the horse and tilbury were worth about a hundred francs.
Scaufflaire called his wife and told her the story. Where the devil was the mayor going? They talked it over. ‘He must be going to Paris,’ the lady said. ‘I don’t think so,’ said her husband. Madeleine had left behind the scrap of paper on which he had scribbled his figures. Scaufflaire studied it carefully. ‘Five – six – eight and a half – they must be post-stages.’ He looked at his wife. ‘I’ve got it.’ … ‘Where?’ … ‘It’s five leagues from here to Hesdin, six from Hesdin to Saint-Pol, and eight and a half from Saint-Pol to Arras. He’s going to Arras.’
Monsieur Madeleine meanwhile was on his way home. This time he went a longer way round, as though deliberately avoiding the presbytery. He went up to his bedroom and shut himself in, which in itself was not unusual, for he often went to bed early. But the factory janitress, who was also his only servant, happening to notice that his light went out at eight-thirty, remarked to the cashier when he came in:
‘Is the mayor not well? I thought he looked a little queer.’
The cashier occupied a room immediately below that of Monsieur Madeleine. Without paying much attention to what the janitress had said, he went to bed and to sleep. But towards midnight he was awakened by the sound of feet pacing up and down overhead, and he recognized the footsteps as those of Monsieur Madeleine. This was strange, for as a rule no sound came from Monsieur Madeleine’s room until he rose in the morning. Then the cashier heard what sounded like the opening and shutting of a wardrobe, followed by the shifting of a piece of furniture. After this the footsteps started again. The cashier, now wide awake, sat up in bed and saw through his window a red glow from a lighted window reflected on the wall opposite. From its direction the light could only be coming from Monsieur Madeleine’s room, and its constant flickering suggested that it was the light of a fire rather than of a lamp. There was no shadow cast by window-bars, which indicated that the window was wide open, and this, considering the coldness of the weather, was surprising. The cashier went back, to sleep, but an hour or two later he woke again. The slow, steady footsteps were still pacing up and down above him.
The light was still reflected on the wall, but now it was pale and steady, like that of a lamp or candle. The window was still open.
We have now to relate what was happening in Monsieur Madeleine’s room.
The reader will have realized that Monsieur Madeleine was indeed Jean Valjean.
We have already peered into the depths of that conscience and must now do so again, although we cannot do so without trembling. Nothing is more terrifying than contemplation of this kind. Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
To make a poem of the human conscience, even in terms of a single man and the least of men, would be to merge all epics in a single epic transcending all. Conscience is the labyrinth of illusion, desire, and pursuit, the furnace of dreams, the repository of thoughts of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophistry, the battlefield of passions. To peer at certain moments into the withdrawn nice of a human being in the act of reflection, to see something of what lies beyond their outward silence, is to discern struggle on a Homeric scale, conflicts of dragons and hydras, aerial hosts as in Milton, towering vistas as in Dante. The infinite space that each man carries within himself, wherein despairingly he contrasts the movements of his spirit with the acts of his life, is an overpowering thing.
Dante Alighieri found himself one day at a fateful doorway which he hesitated to enter. We too are confronted by such a doorway, and we too must hesitate but enter none the less.
There is little to be added to what the reader already knows about Jean Valjean, following his encounter with the boy, Petit-Gervais. Thereafter, as we have seen, he was a changed man, enacting in his life what the bishop had sought to make of him. It was more than a transformation; it was a transfiguration.
He contrived to vanish, sold the bishop’s silver, keeping only the candlesticks as a reminder, and worked his way from town to town across France until eventually he came to Montreuil-sur-mer. Here he established himself in the manner we have described, rendered himself both unassailable and inaccessible, and, with a conscience darkened by his past but in the knowledge that the second half of his life was a repudiation of the first, settled down to live peaceably and hopefully with only two objects in mind – to conceal his true identity and sanctify his life, and to escape from men and find his way back to God.
The two considerations were so closely linked as to be inseparable in his mind, both so absorbing and overriding as to govern his every act. As a rule they worked harmoniously in his daily conduct, inclining him towards aloofness, making him benevolent and simple, both guiding him along the same path. But it happened occasionally that there was a clash between them, and on these occasions, as we have seen, the man known to Montreuil-sur-mer as Monsieur Madeleine did not hesitate to sacrifice the first consideration to the second – his personal security to his moral principles. Against all prudence he had kept the bishop’s candlesticks and worn mourning for him; he sought out and questioned every vagabond boy who passed through the town; he had had inquiries made among the families in Faverolles, and he had saved the life of old Fauchelevent, regardless of Javert’s penetrating eye. He had, it seems, concluded, after the manner of saints and sages, that his first duty was not to himself.
But no situation like the present had ever before arisen. Never had the two principles governing the life of this unfortunate man been brought so sharply into conflict. He had been made to realize this, still confusedly but profoundly, by the first words spoken by Javert when he entered his room. When the name he had sought to bury under so many layers of concealment was so unexpectedly uttered he had been completely stunned, dazed by the sinister quixotry of his destiny, and in his bewilderment he had known the tremor that precedes any great shock; he had bowed like an oak-tree at the approach of a tempest, or a soldier at the approach of an attack. He had felt the thunder-clouds massing above his head, and his first thought, as he listened to Javert, was to throw in his hand, to give himself up, get the man Champmathieu out of prison and take his place. It was a thought as piercing and agonizing as a knife-thrust in living flesh. But then it passed, and he said to himself, ‘Steady – steady!’ Repressing that first generous impulse, he recoiled from the heroic act.
Certainly it would have been a great thing if, following the bishop’s solemn admonition, after the years of repentance and self-denial and in the full flood of a rehabilitation so well begun, he had not faltered even in the face of this fearful dilemma but had steadily pursued his course towards the abyss in the heart of which lay spiritual salvation; it would have been a great thing, but it did not happen. We must give a true account of what took place in his soul, and of nothing else. The first victor was the instinct of self-preservation. He hastily re-ordered his thoughts, controlled his emotions, took due note of the perilous proximity of Javert, postponed any final decision with a firmness inspired by terror, concentrated upon what had to be done and recovered his calm like a warrior retrieving his shield.
During the rest of the day he remained in that state of inward turmoil and outward serenity, taking only what may be termed ‘safety precautions’. Everything was confusion in his mind, to the extent that he could see nothing clearly and could only have accounted for himself by saying that he had been dealt a stunning blow. He paid his customary visit to Fantine and prolonged it from kindness and with a feeling that he must lay particular injunctions on the sister in case he should be obliged to be absent. He had a vague notion that he should go to Arras, without being at all decided about it, telling himself that since he was exempt from all suspicion it could do no harm for him to go and see what happened; and so he hired the tilbury, in case he should need it.
He dined with a good appetite; but back in his bedroom he began to think.
He reviewed his situation and found it unbelievable, so much so that at one moment, prompted by an almost reasonless impulse, he got up from his chair and bolted the door. He was afraid of what might enter, barricading himself against the impossible.
The lamp worried him and he blew it out, afraid lest someone should see him.
Who?
Alas, what he sought to exclude and to stifle was already present in the room. It was his own conscience.
His conscience: that is to say, God.
But for a time he was able to lull himself into a sense of security. With the door bolted no one could lay hands on him, and with the light extinguished he was invisible. Seated in darkness with his elbows on the table and his head resting on his hands, he reflected.
‘Where am I? Is this a dream? Did I really see Javert, and did he really say those things? This man Champmathieu, does he really look so like me? Is it conceivable? When I think how untroubled I was yesterday morning, how far from suspecting anything! What was I doing at that time? What does this whole business mean? What am I to do now?’
Such was his state of torment. His brain had lost the power to grasp the thoughts that sped like waves through it while he clutched his forehead in an effort to control them. It was a turmoil swamping his willpower and reason, from which nothing emerged except the sense of his own anguish as he sought in vain for clarity and resolve.
His head was burning. He got up and flung open the window. There were no stars in the sky. He came back and sat down again at the table.
The first hour passed in this fashion.
By degrees the thoughts began to crystallize in his mind and he was able to take a clearer view of his situation, not as a whole but in certain of its details. He perceived that, extraordinary and critical though it was, he was nevertheless entirely master of it.
This merely deepened his perplexity.
Apart from their strict underlying religious intention, his every act until that day had been for the purpose of digging a hole in which his real name might be buried. What he had most feared, in his moments of recollection and his wakeful nights, was to hear that name spoken. He had said to himself that the rebirth of that name would for him mean the end of everything, the destruction of the new life he had built, even – who could tell? – of the new soul he had fashioned. The thought alone, the very possibility, made him shudder. Had anyone told him that a day would come when the name, the hideous words ‘Jean Valjean’, would suddenly resound in his ears like a thunderclap, coming like a blaze of light out of darkness to tear aside the mystery in which he had disguised himself; and had they gone on to tell him that this would be no threat unless he chose to make it so, that the light would serve merely to deepen his disguise and that the worthy Monsieur Madeleine, being confronted with the ghost of Jean Valjean, might emerge from the encounter even more honoured and secure than before – had anyone said this to him he would have stared in amazement, thinking the words insane. Yet this was precisely what had happened, this heaping-up of impossibilities was a fact; God had allowed the fantasy to become reality.
As his mind cleared he became more precisely aware of his position. It was as though he had awakened out of sleep to find himself sliding down a slope in darkness, upright and shivering, struggling in vain to check his descent on the edge of a precipice. He saw clearly the figure of another man, a stranger, whom Destiny had mistaken for himself and was thrusting into that chasm. Someone had to go into the chasm, he or another, if it was to be sealed up.
He had only to let things take their course.
It came to this: that his place in prison was still vacant, rendered vacant by his robbery of the boy, that it was empty and awaiting him and would continue to claim him until he returned to it, and that this was inexorable. But now it seemed that he had found a substitute, the luckless Champmathieu. He could, if he chose, be in two places at once, a prisoner in the person of Champmathieu, and a member of society under the name of Madeleine, with nothing more to fear provided he allowed the brand of infamy to be set on Champmathieu’s head, the stigma which, like a tombstone, once set in place can never be removed.
All this was so appalling and so strange that it caused in him the sort of upheaval that men experience only twice or thrice in a lifetime, a spiritual convulsion compounded of all the suspect elements in the heart, irony, triumph, desperation – something that may be termed an inward burst of laughter.
He suddenly re-lit his candle.
‘After all,’ he thought, ‘what am I afraid of? Why do I have to sit here brooding? I’m safe at last. The one door through which the past might have entered to disrupt my life has now been closed, walled-up for good. The man who so nearly guessed the truth – who did guess it, by God! – Javert, the bloodhound sniffing at my heels, has been thrown completely off the scent. He has got his Jean Valjean and will trouble me no more. Very likely he will choose to leave the town and go elsewhere. And none of this is my doing. I had no part in it. So what is wrong? To look at me one might think that I had been overtaken by disaster. But after all, if another man is in trouble, that is not my fault. Providence has ordained it, and who am I to fly in the face of Providence? What more can I ask? The blessing I have most longed for during these years, the subject of my nightly dreams and prayers to Heaven, has now been granted me – perfect security! God has caused it to happen, and it is not for me to oppose the will of God. And why does God want it? So that I may continue as I have begun, to do good in the world and to set an example to other men, to let it be seen that the way of virtue and repentance is not divorced from happiness. I no longer understand why I was afraid to visit the curé, confess to him and ask his counsel, when clearly that is what he would have said to me – the matter has been settled, leave things as they are, let God have His way.’
Thus he reflected in the depths of his conscience, suspended, as it were, over his personal abyss. He got up and began to pace the room. ‘No need to think about it any more,’ he said. ‘I have made up my mind.’
But he was far from happy.
We can no more prevent a thought returning to the mind than we can prevent the sea from rising on the foreshore. To the sailor it is the tide, to the uneasy conscience it is remorse. God moves the soul as He moves the oceans.
After a little while, despite himself, he resumed that sombre dialogue in which he was both speaker and audience, saying things he did not wish to say, hearing things he did not wish to hear, yielding to that mysterious power which said to him, ‘Reflect’, as two thousand years before it had said to another condemned man, ‘Take up thy Cross!’
At that point, and in order that we may be fully understood, we must interpolate an observation.
It is certain that we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking person who has not done so. It may indeed be said that the word is never a more splendid mystery than when it travels in a man’s mind from thought to conscience and back again to thought. The expressions frequently used in this chapter, such as ‘He said’, ‘He exclaimed’, are to be interpreted in this sense. We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult wherein everything speaks except our mouth. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.
He asked himself where he stood, and he questioned the ‘decision’ he had arrived at. He confessed to himself that what he had resolved upon – to let things take their course, to let God have his way – was quite simply outrageous. To acquiesce in this blunder on the part of destiny and men, to make no effort to prevent it, to endorse it by his silence, in short, to do nothing, was in fact to do everything: it was to descend to the most abject depths of criminal hypocrisy and cowardice.
For the first time in eight years the unhappy man had tasted the bitter flavour of an evil thought and an evil deed.
He spat it out in disgust.
He pursued his self-questioning, sternly demanding what he had meant when he said, ‘My object is achieved.’ Certainly his life had a purpose, but was it simply to hide himself, to outwit the police? Had everything he had done been for no better reason than this? Had he not had a greater purpose, the saving not of his life but of his soul, the resolve to become a good and honourable and upright man as the bishop required of him – had not that been his true and deepest intention? Now he talked of closing the door on the past when, God help him, he would be reopening the door by committing an infamous act, not merely that of a thief but of the most odious of thieves. He would be robbing a man of his life, his peace, his place in the sun, morally murdering him by condemning him to the living death that is called a convict prison. But if, on the other hand, he saved the man by repairing the blunder, by proclaiming himself Jean Valjean the felon, this would be to achieve his own true resurrection and firmly close the door on the hell from which he sought to escape. To return to it in appearance would be to escape from it in reality. This was what he must do, and without it he would have accomplished nothing, his life would be wasted, his repentance meaningless, and there would be nothing left for him to say except, ‘Who cares?’ He felt the presence of the bishop, more urgent than in life; he felt the old priest’s eyes upon him and knew that henceforth Monsieur Madeleine the mayor, with all his virtues, would seem to him abominable, whereas Jean Valjean the felon would be admirable and pure. Other men would see the mask, but the bishop would see the face; others would see the life, but he would see the soul. So there was nothing for it but to go to Arras and rescue the false Jean Valjean by proclaiming the true one. The most heartrending of sacrifices, the most poignant of victories, the ultimate, irretrievable step – but it had to be done. It was his most melancholy destiny that he could achieve sanctity in the eyes of God only by returning to degradation in the eyes of men.
‘Well then,’ he said, ‘let us decide upon it. Let us do our duty and save this man.’
Without knowing it he spoke the words aloud.
He turned to his account-books, checked them and saw that they were in order. He threw a sheaf of papers on the fire, the promissory notes of small tradesmen whom he knew to be in difficulties. He wrote and sealed a letter addressed to Monsieur Lafitte, banker, Rue d’Artois, Paris. Opening his desk he got out a wallet containing banknotes and the identity-card he had used in the year when he went to vote in the election.
Anyone watching him while he did these things would have discerned nothing of the heavy thoughts moving in his mind except that now and then his lips moved and now and then he stood fixedly regarding some object in the room as though it contained the answer to a question.
Having written the letter to M. Lafitte he put it in his pocket with the wallet and began to pace up and down again.
The tenor of his thoughts had not changed. Whichever way he looked, the course of duty glared at him as though the words were written in letters of fire – ‘Stand up and say your name!’
And at the same time, as though they had assumed a tangible form, he saw the principles that had constituted the twofold rule of his life – to keep his name hidden, and to purify his soul. For the first time he saw them as wholly separate, and he saw the difference between them. He saw that whereas one must be good the other might turn to evil, that one spoke of dedication and the other of self-interest, that one proceeded from the light and the other from the dark.
He saw the conflict between them, and as the picture grew in his mind they took on huge proportions, so that he seemed to be witnessing within himself, amid the lights and shadows of that infinity of which we have spoken, a struggle between a goddess and a giantess. He was filled with terror, but it seemed to him that the good had gained the upper hand.
He perceived that this was the second turning-point in his spiritual life and in his destiny: the bishop had been the first, and the man Champmathieu marked the second. This was the uttermost crisis, the final trial of his fortitude.
His fevered state, which for a time had abated, was now rising again. A thousand thoughts crossed his mind, but still they reaffirmed his resolution.
He said to himself at one moment that perhaps he was taking the whole matter too seriously, that the man Champmathieu was perhaps not so important after all, and in any case he was a thief. But to this he replied that if the man had stolen a few apples it would entail no more than a month’s prison sentence – a far step from the galleys. And who was to say for certain that he had stolen anything? The name of Jean Valjean seemed to render further proof unnecessary. Was not this how the king’s prosecutors reasoned? A man is believed to be a thief because he is known to be a felon.
Then again the thought occurred to him that perhaps when he gave himself up, the nobility of the act would be taken into account, his honourable life during the past seven years, the good he had done, and that because of this he would be exonerated. But he quickly dismissed this thought, reflecting bitterly that the theft of those forty sous from Petit-Gervais would certainly be recalled, and that by this act he had become a recidivist, subject to hard-labour in perpetuity under the stringent terms of the law.
Setting aside all illusion, he sought to detach himself from earthly things and to find strength and consolation elsewhere. He told himself that he must do his duty and that perhaps he would be no more unhappy when he had done it than if he evaded it and allowed the honour and dignity, the high esteem, the wealth and popularity of Monsieur Madeleine to be rendered secretly shameful by a criminal act – and what sort of taste would that leave in his mouth? Whereas, if he made the sacrifice, all would be redeemed – the squalor of imprisonment, the suffering, the endless labour and ignominy – ly the assurance in his heart.
Finally he said to himself that in any event it was unavoidable. This was his destiny and he could not alter what had been ordained. The choice had been forced upon him between outward virtue and inward infamy, or outward degradation and purity of heart.
This play of melancholy thoughts did not lessen his courage but it wearied his brain. He began to think at random of irrelevant things. He was still pacing the room, with the blood beating violently at his temples. Midnight sounded, first from the parish church and then from the Town Hall. He counted the strokes, mentally comparing the two clocks, and this caused him to recall that a few days before he had seen in a second-hand shop an old clock bearing the name Antoine Albin de Romainville. He was cold. He stirred the fire, but it did not occur to him to shut the window.
He was falling into a state of apathy, and it cost him an effort to recall what he had been thinking about before midnight sounded. Finally he remembered. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have decided to give myself up.’
Then suddenly he thought of Fantine. ‘That poor woman!’ he exclaimed.
The abrupt recollection, coming as it were out of the blue, seemed to shed an entirely new light on his predicament. He exclaimed:
‘But …! I have been thinking of nothing but myself and my own peace of mind. I am to keep quiet or give myself up – stay hidden or save my soul – live on as a respected, despicable mayor or as a despised but honourable galley-slave. All this is pure egotism. What if I were to think of others, as our Christian duty requires?’
He began now to consider the consequences of his departure from the scene. The town and the whole region would suffer, the industry he had created, the workpeople, men and women and children, the old and needy, the many families who depended on him. He had come to a place that was moribund and made it prosperous, brought life to a desert. With his going that life would start to ebb, without him the place would sink and die. And did he owe nothing to Fan-tine, for whose sufferings he was in some degree responsible? He had promised to retrieve her child. If he failed in this, she too would surely the, and the Lord knew what would become of the child. All this would follow if he gave himself up. And what if he did not?
He paused on the question, seeming to hesitate for an instant and tremble; but then he resumed calmly:
‘A man will go to life-imprisonment. But he was guilty of theft, no need to pretend otherwise. And I shall stay where I am, and that mother will be able to bring up her child. In ten years I shall have amassed ten millions and this will enrich the whole community. The money means nothing to me. The whole region will benefit – greater prosperity, new industries, more people. New villages will spring up where now there are only farms, and farms where now there is only waste land. Want will be abolished, and with it the crimes and vices that it causes. A rich and smiling land! And all this is to be sacrificed for what? For my personal gratification, for the sake of an heroic gesture, an act of melodrama. A woman is to the in hospital and her child on the streets, a whole community is to suffer, to save a man from a punishment which may or may not be excessive (he may well deserve it for something else; he is an old rascal anyway who cannot have long to live) – and in order that my private conscience may be appeased. But that is madness! If there is to be a weight on my conscience it is my own affair. My duty is to others, not to myself.’
He got up and again began to pace the room, feeling now that his conscience was at rest. Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind. It seemed to him that having penetrated to those depths, having groped in the heart of darkness, he had found and grasped a diamond of truth that now lay gleaming in his hand.
‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘this is the right course. There has to be a guiding principle. My mind is made up. I shall leave things as they are and there will be no more vacillation. I am Madeleine and will continue to be Madeleine, and as for the man who now bears the name of Valjean, so much the worse for him. I am no longer Valjean, I do not know him and he is no concern of mine. If another man has been inflicted with his name, that is the work of Chance, and Chance alone is responsible.’ He looked at himself in the mirror over the mantelshelf. ‘Oh, the relief of having decided! Already I feel a new man.’
He resumed his pacing of the room, but abruptly stopped, arrested by the thought that, now his decision had been taken, he must shirk none of its consequences. There were still objects concealed in that room which linked him with Jean Valjean and might bear witness against him if they were not destroyed.
Getting a small key out of his purse, he inserted it in a keyhole which was scarcely visible even to himself, so lost was it in the darker tints of the wallpaper. He opened the door of a cupboard, a sort of wardrobe built in between the projecting chimney and the corner of the room. The cupboard contained some rags of underclothing, a blue canvas smock, an old pair of trousers, a knapsack, and a stick with a ferrule at either end. Anyone who had seen Jean Valjean on his way through Digne in October 1815 would have recognized these things.
He had preserved them, with the silver candlesticks, as a reminder of the day when he had started life anew. But whereas he hid the prison relics, the bishop’s candlesticks were openly displayed.
He looked furtively towards the door as though he feared that it might suddenly open, bolted though it was; then with a single, rapid movement, and without a glance at the relics which he had perilously guarded for so long, he tossed the whole bundle, rags, stick and knapsack, on to the fire. He closed the cupboard and as an added precaution, meaningless now that it was empty, moved a large piece of furniture in front of it to conceal the door.
In a very short time the room was lit up as the bundle burst into flame, while the thorn stick crackled, sending sparks far across the floor.
As the knapsack with its squalid contents disintegrated, something gleamed amid the embers. Closer examination would have shown that it was a coin – doubtless the forty-sou piece stolen from a small boy. But he was not looking at the fire. He had resumed his steady pacing of the room.
His eye was caught suddenly by the faint reflection of firelight in the silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece. ‘Another reminder of Jean Valjean,’ he thought. ‘I must get rid of them.’ And he took them down.
The fire was still hot enough to melt them into a shapeless lump of metal. For a moment he bent over it, warming himself with a genuine sense of comfort. ‘How pleasant the heat is,’ he thought. He stirred the embers with one of the candlesticks. In another minute both would have been on the fire.
But at that moment it seemed to him that he heard a voice speaking within him.
‘Jean Valjean! Jean Valjean!’
The words filled him with terror, and the hair rose on his scalp.
‘So be it,’ said the voice. ‘Finish what you have begun. Destroy the candlesticks, blot out the memory, forget the bishop, forget everything and think well of yourself. You have decided! An old man who understands nothing of what has happened, whose only crime may be that your name is now inflicted upon him, is to be sentenced in your place, condemned for the rest of his days to abjection and servitude. And you will remain an upright citizen, the respected and honoured Monsieur le maire. You will enrich the town, feed the poor, protect the orphan and live happy in the light of every man’s esteem while another man wears the blue smock and the fetters which are rightly yours and bears your name in degradation. How fortunately things have turned out for you!’
The sweat had started on his brow and he stared haggardly into the flame. But the speaker in his heart had still not finished.
‘Many voices will praise you, Jean Valjean, many will bless you, but there is one man who will not hear them and will curse you in his darkness. Take good heed! The blessings will fall away before they are heard in Heaven, and only the curse will reach God!’
The voice, weak at first and rising from the depths of his conscience, had gained in power until it rang in his ears, seeming now to come from somewhere outside himself, the last words so loud that he gazed round in terror and cried:
‘Is someone there?’ then answered the question with a foolish laugh: ‘I’m being stupid. There can’t be anyone.’
There was someone none the less, but it was not someone whom the human eye could see.
He put the candlesticks back on the mantlepiece, and the mournful regularity of his footsteps up and down the room disturbed the slumbers of the sleeper in the room below.
The act of walking both soothed and stimulated him. There are moments of crisis when we seek release in movement, as though to take council with any random object that meets our eye. But now it served only to heighten the consciousness of his predicament. The ironic chance that this man Champmathieu should have been mistaken for himself, and that this accident, which Providence seemed to have contrived for his salvation, must also cut the ground from beneath his feet! He had taken two decisions and now he recoiled from both, finding each unthinkable.
For a moment, and in utter despair, he envisaged the consequences of giving himself up, all he would be losing and what he would be getting in its place. He would be saying good-bye to a blameless and happy life, to honour, liberty, and every man’s esteem. He would be free no longer to walk the fields, listen to birdsong, give pennies to the children. No look of warmth and gratitude would meet his gaze. He would leave the house he had built and this small room he lived in, which now seemed to him so pleasant; and the old concierge, his only servant, would no longer bring him his coffee in the morning. All this would go, and in its place would be the chain-gang and the convict smock, the plank bed and the cell, all the horrors that he knew. At his age, after becoming what he now was! If he were still young … But an old man, barefoot in iron-shod clogs, subject to insult and ill-usage, forced to show a leg morning and evening to the warder who inspected his fetters; a sight to be shown to the casual visitor, who would be told, ‘That’s the famous Jean Valjean, the one who was the Mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer’ … Fate, it seemed, could be as malignant as the human intelligence, as remorseless as the human heart!
Whichever way he turned, he faced the same alternatives – to cling to his paradise and become a devil, or become a saint by going back to hell. In God’s name, what was he to do?
He was beset again with the mental agonies which for a time he had so painfully dispelled, and his thinking again became confused, lapsing into the apathetic sluggishness that is a part of despair. A name, Romainville, floated into his memory, and with it two lines of a song he had once heard. Romainville, he recalled, was a wood near Paris where young lovers went to gather lilac in April. He was lurching physically as well as spiritually, like an infant walking for the first time.
Struggling with this growing lassitude, he sought to bring some order into his thoughts, striving still to confront, and resolve for good and all, the dilemma which had brought him to this state of exhaustion: should he give himself up or keep silent? But he could see nothing clearly. The notions that flooded through his mind were becoming clouded, vanishing in smoke. One thing alone was plain to him, that whichever way he went something in him must inevitably die. Whether he turned right or left the end was a sepulchre, the death of one thing or the other, happiness or virtue. For the rest, all his uncertainties had returned. He was no further advanced than when he had begun.
Thus he strove in torment as another man had striven eighteen hundred years before him, the mysterious Being in whom were embodied all the saintliness and suffering of mankind. He too while the olive-leaves quivered around him, had again and again refused the terrible cup of darkness urged upon him beneath a sky filled with stars.
The clocks had struck three, and he had been pacing the room almost without pause for five hours, when at length he sank into his chair. He fell asleep and dreamed.
Like most dreams, this one was related to his situation only in its sense of heart-break and doom. Nevertheless it made so great an impression on him that later he wrote it down. His account of it is among the documents left behind after his death, and since the story of that night would be incomplete without it, we reproduce it here. It is the sombre fantasy of a sick soul.
The inscription on the envelope reads: ‘What I dreamed that night’.
I was in the country, a vast, barren landscape where there seemed to be neither day nor night.
I was walking with my brother, the brother of my childhood years, of whom I may say I never think and whom I have almost forgotten.
We were talking and people passed us. We were talking about a woman, formerly a neighbour of ours, who when she was living in the same street always worked with her window open. As we talked about her we felt the chill of that open window.
There were no trees to be seen.
A man passed close to us. He was naked, the colour of ashes, and he was riding a horse the colour of earth. He was hairless, we could see his bare skull and the veins on his skull. He carried a wand in his hand, supple as a vine-twig and heavy as iron. He passed by and said nothing.
My brother said, ‘Let us go by the sunken road.’
There was no shrub to be seen in the sunken road, nor any patch of moss. Everything was the colour of earth, even the sky. I said something as we walked along, and there was no reply. I found that my brother was no longer there.
I came to a village and thought when I saw it that it must be Romainville (why Romainville?).
The street by which I entered was deserted. I turned into a second street. At the corner of the two streets a man was standing with his back to the wall. I asked him, ‘What is this place? Where am I?’ He did not answer. I saw the open door of a house and went in.
There was no one in the first room. I went into the next. Behind the door of this room a man was standing with his back to the wall. I asked him: ‘Whose house is this? Where am I?’ He did not answer. The house had a garden.
I went into the garden. It was empty. Behind the first tree I found a man standing. I asked him: ‘What garden is this? Where am I?’ He did not answer.
I wandered through the village and perceived that it was a town. All the streets were deserted, all the doors were open. No living person passed along the streets or moved in the rooms or walked in the gardens. But at every street-corner, and behind every doorway and every tree, a man stood and was silent. I never saw more than one at a time. They watched me as I passed.
I left the town and walked on through the fields.
After a time I looked back and saw a large crowd coming behind me. I recognized all the men I had seen in the town. They bore themselves strangely. Without seeming to hurry they were walking faster than I. They made no sound as they walked. In a very little while they had caught up with me and surrounded me. The men’s faces were the colour of earth.
The man whom I had first seen and questioned when I entered the town now said to me: ‘Where are you going? Don’t you know that you have been dead for a long time?’
I opened my mouth to reply, and found that there was no one there.
He awoke from his dream. He was very cold. A wind as chill as the wind at daybreak was causing the frame of the open window to creak in its hinges. The fire had gone out and the candle was nearly burnt down. The night was still black.
He got up and went to the window. There were still no stars in the sky.
From the window he could see the courtyard and the street. A sudden sharp sound caused him to look down. He saw two red stars below him, their rays oddly expanding and contracting in the darkness. ‘No stars in the sky,’ he thought, still bemused by his dream. ‘They are on earth instead.’
This illusion was dispelled by a repetition of the sound, which woke him up completely. He saw that the two stars were the lamps of a carriage of which he could now distinguish the shape. It was a tilbury with a small white horse between the shafts, and the sound he had heard was that of the horse’s hoofs on the cobbles.
‘What is it doing here?’ he wondered. ‘Who can have called at this hour?’
At this moment there was a timid knock on the door. He shivered from head to foot and cried in a voice of fury:
‘Who’s there?’
‘It’s me, Monsieur le maire.’
He recognized the voice of the old woman, his servant.
‘Well, what’s the matter?’
‘It will soon be five o’clock, Monsieur le maire.’
‘Well?’
‘The carriage is here.’
‘The tilbury.’
‘What tilbury?’
‘Did not Monsieur le maire order a tilbury?’
‘No,’ he answered.
‘The driver says he has brought it for you.’
‘What driver?’
‘Master Scaufflaire’s driver.’
‘Scauffaire?’ And suddenly a light dawned. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Monsieur Scaufflaire.’
Had the old woman been able to see his expression at that moment she would have been frightened out of her wits.
There was a pause. He was staring stupidly at the candle, and, scraping up a little of the melted wax, he rolled it into a ball between his fingers. The old woman waited and at length ventured to raise her voice.
‘Monsieur le maire, what am I to say to him?’
‘Tell him to wait. I’m coming down.’
The postal service between Arras and Montreuil-sur-mer in those days still made use of small conveyances dating from the time of the Empire. They were two-wheel carts upholstered inside with rough leather, mounted on cylindrical springs and having two seats, one for the driver and one for a passenger. The wheels were fitted with those long, aggressive hubs that keep other vehicles at a distance and are still to be seen in Germany. The very large oblong mailbox was built into the back and painted black, while the trap itself was yellow.
We have nothing like them today. They had an oddly humpbacked appearance, and seen from far off, as they came into sight on the crest of a hill, they resembled the insects known, I think, as termites, which can pull a load much bigger than themselves. They travelled very fast. The post-cart which left Arras at one o’clock in the morning, having picked up the Paris mail, reached Montreuil-sur-mer a little before five.
As it approached the town that morning, coming down the slope from Hesdin, the post-cart clashed on a bend in the road with a small tilbury with a white horse which was being driven in the opposite direction by its sole occupant, a man in a greatcoat. The wheel of the tilbury received a heavy blow. The postman called to the driver to stop, but he took no notice and drove on at a fast trot.
‘He’s in a devil of a hurry,’ the postman said.
Where was he going, this man in a hurry whose tribulations must surely have moved us to compassion? He could not have said. Why was he driving so fast? He did not know. He was driving blindly, he did not know where. To Arras, certainly; but perhaps to another place as well. He realized this at moments and shuddered.
He was driving through the darkness as though into an abyss. Something thrust him forward and something drew him on. His state of mind was such as no words can describe but all men will understand. Is there any man who, once at least in his life, has not found himself in that blackness of uncertainty? He had resolved nothing, decided nothing, settled nothing. Out of all his agonies of conscience no finality had emerged. More than ever he was back where he had started.
Why, then, was he going to Arras?
He repeated the arguments he had used when he hired the tilbury – that whatever the outcome it could do no harm for him to see with his own eyes and decide for himself; that it was even prudent, since he needed to know what took place; that no judgement could be formed except through firsthand observation and considered scrutiny; that distance made molehills into mountains, and when he set eyes on this Champmathieu, and saw him to be the worthless creature he doubtless was, he might well find it within his conscience to let him go to prison in his place. It was true that Javert would be there, as well as Brevet, Chenildieu, and Cochepaille, convicts who had known him in the past; but they would never recognize him in the Madeleine he now was. The thing was inconceivable. Even Javert had been completely misled. Suspicion and conjecture – than which nothing is more pig-headed – were entirely concentrated on Champmathieu.
So he was in no danger. This was a dark moment in his life, but one that he could live through. When all was said, his fate, however ugly it might prove to be, was in his own hands; he was its master. He clung to this thought.
In his heart he would have preferred not to go to Arras.
However he was going there, and he whipped up his horse, keeping it to the steady trot which covers seven or eight miles in an hour, but feeling something shrink within him as he drew nearer.
By daybreak he was in open country with Montreuil-sur-mer a good distance behind him. He watched the skyline grow light, and was aware, without observing it, of the chilly aspect of a winter’s dawn. Morning, like evening, has its ghosts. He did not see them but was still conscious, as though by their physical presence, of the dark shapes of trees and hills making their mournful contribution to his violently agitated state of mind. Passing an occasional isolated house at the side of the road, he thought to himself, ‘And there are people still sleeping!’ The clop of the horse’s hoofs, the jingle of harness and the clatter of the wheels over cobbles were a monotonous accompaniment to his thoughts – delightful sounds when we are in good spirits, but most dismal when we are melancholy.
It was broad daylight when he reached Hesdin, where he stopped at an inn to rest and feed his horse.
The horse, as Scaufflaire had said, was of the small, Boulonnais stock, overlarge in the head and belly and short in the neck, but with a broad chest and wide rump, stringy legs and sure feet; an unbeautiful breed, but healthy and robust. It had covered five leagues in two hours and there was no sweat on its flanks.
He did not get out of the tilbury. The stable-lad who brought the oats bent down suddenly to examine the left wheel and asked:
‘Are you going far like this?’
He answered absently: ‘Why?’
‘Have you come far?’ the boy asked.
‘About five leagues.’
‘Ah.’
‘What does that “ah” mean?’
The boy took another close look at the wheel and then stood up.
‘That wheel may have lasted for five leagues, but it certainly won’t do more than another half league.’
He jumped down from the tilbury. ‘Why do you say that, lad?’
‘I say it’s a marvel you’ve done as much as five leagues without going into the ditch. You can see for yourself.’
The wheel was, in fact, badly damaged. The clash with the post-cart had cracked two spokes and loosened the hub.
‘Is there a wheelwright handy?’ Madeleine asked.
‘Will you be so good as to fetch him.’
‘He’s next door – hey, Maître Bourgaillard!’
Maître Bourgaillard, the wheelwright, was standing in his doorway. He came over to look at the wheel and pursed his lips like a surgeon over a broken leg.
‘Can you repair it for me immediately?’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
‘When shall I be able to leave?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘It will take a good day’s work. Is Monsieur in a great hurry?’
‘A very great hurry. I must be on my way in an hour at the most.’
‘Monsieur, that is impossible.’
‘I’ll pay whatever you ask.’
‘It can’t be done.’
‘Well then, two hours.’
‘It still can’t be done. I shall have to make two new spokes and a hub. Monsieur will not be able to leave before tomorrow.’
‘My business won’t wait until tomorrow. If you can’t repair the wheel, can you replace it?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You’re a wheelwright. Can you not sell me a new wheel? Then I could get on at once.’
‘A single wheel? I haven’t one that would fit. Wheels go in pairs, Monsieur. They have to match.’
‘Then let me have a pair.’
‘But all wheels don’t fit all axles, Monsieur.’
‘You can at least try.’
‘It wouldn’t do, Monsieur. I only have cartwheels to sell. We’re small people in these parts.’
‘Have you a gig for hire?’
The wheelwright had seen at a glance that the tilbury was hired. He shrugged his shoulders.
‘You make a fine mess of the things you hire. I wouldn’t let you have one even if I could.’
‘Will you sell me one?’
‘I haven’t got one to sell.’
‘Not a light carriage of any kind? I’m not particular.’
‘This is a small village. All the same,’ said the wheelwright, ‘there’s an old barouche which I house in my shed for a gentleman from the town who only uses it once in a month of Sundays. No reason why I shoudn’t hire you that one provided the owner doesn’t know. But it’s a barouche, like I said. It needs two horses.’
‘I’ll hire post-horses.’
‘Where would your honour be going?’
‘To Arras.’
‘And you want to arrive today?’
‘I must.’
‘It wouldn’t do for you to arrive at four in the morning?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Well, you see, when it comes to hiring post-horses … Your honour has identity papers?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you can hire post-horses but you still won’t get to Arras before tomorrow. This is a side-road and the stages are badly served. And it’s the start of the ploughing season when the farmers need big teams. They get horses wherever they can, from the posts or anywhere else. You’d have to wait three or four hours at every stage. And you’d be going at a walk. There are a lot of hills.’
‘Then I shall have to ride. Will you please unharness the tilbury. I take it someone can sell me a saddle.’
‘Yes. But is this a saddle-horse?’
‘Ah. It’s as well you reminded me. It won’t take a saddle.’
‘In that case …’
‘Surely there’s a horse in the village I can hire?’
‘To go from here to Arras in one stretch? It would take a better horse than you’ll find in these parts. You’d have to buy it in any case, because you aren’t known round here. But you’d never get one, even if you offered a thousand francs.’
‘Then what am I to do?’
‘The only honest advice I can give you is to let me repair the wheel and go on tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow will be too late.’
‘Well, I’m sorry.’
‘Isn’t there a mail that goes to Arras? When does it arrive here?’
‘Tonight. The mails both travel at night, one up, one down.’
‘And it will really take a whole day’s work to repair this wheel?’
‘A long one at that.’
‘Even if you put two men on it?’
‘Can’t you bind the spokes with twine?’
‘Yes, perhaps; but that won’t mend the hub. And the felloe’s in bad shape.’
‘Is there anyone in the town with carriages for hire?’
‘No.’
‘Is there another wheelwright?’
The stable-boy and Maître Bourgaillard both shook their heads.
Madeleine felt a sense of overwhelming relief.
Clearly this was the work of Providence. It was by pure mischance that his wheel had been broken, a gesture on the part of Providence that at first he had ignored. He had done everything in his power to continue his journey, scrupulously examining every possibility. He had not let himself be put off by the season of the year, by fatigue, or by the cost. He had no cause to reproach himself. If he could get no further it was not his doing; Providence alone was to blame.
He drew a deep breath, able for the first time since Javert’s visit to breathe freely, feeling that the iron band which for twenty hours had constricted his chest was now loosened. God was on his side and had declared the fact. He told himself that he had done his utmost and might now turn back with his conscience at rest.
If this conversation had taken place inside the inn, without being overheard, it is probable that the matter would have ended there, and that the long train of events which were to follow would never have occurred. But a conversation in a village street invariably attracts an audience. There are always people who want to hear. A group of spectators had gathered round them while he was questioning the wheelwright, among them a boy who slipped unnoticed out of the circle and broke into a run.
Just as Madeleine was finally making up his mind, this youngster returned, bringing with him an elderly woman.
‘Monsieur,’ she said, ‘my boy tells me that you want to hire a gig.’
The harmless words, so inoffensively uttered, made him break into a cold sweat. The hand that had had him by the throat seemed to re-emerge from the darkness he thought he had left behind him, preparing to renew its grip.
He answered, ‘That is true, Madame. I do wish to hire a gig.’ And then he said quickly: ‘But there isn’t one to be had.’
‘But there is,’ the woman said.
‘Where is it?’ asked the wheelwright.
‘In my yard.’
Madeleine trembled. The hand had seized him again.
The old woman did indeed possess a sort of gig with a wicker body which she kept under a lean-to shed in her yard. The stable-boy and the wheelwright, disconsolate at losing a customer, both vigorously decried it. It was a wreck, they said – a box mounted unsprung on its axle, with seats slung on leather straps – open to the weather – wheels rusted and rotten with damp – no more fit to take the road than the tilbury – the gentleman would be mad to trust himself to it – and so on …
All this was true, but decrepit though it was, the vehicle had both its wheels and might still get him to Arras.
He paid what was asked, left the tilbury to be repaired by the wheelwright, had the white horse harnessed to the gig, got in and continued on his way.
He confessed to himself as he started that a very short time before he had rejoiced in the thought that he need go no further: now he looked back on this rejoicing with a kind of anger, finding it absurd. Why take pleasure in retreat? After all, he had undertaken this journey of his own free will, no one had compelled him. And certainly nothing would come of it unless he decided otherwise.
As he was leaving Hesdin he heard a voice calling to him, ‘Stop! Stop!’ He pulled up sharply, with a gesture of convulsive eagerness akin to hope.
It was the boy, the old woman’s servant.
‘Monsieur, I’m the one who found the gig for you.’
‘Well?’
‘You haven’t given me anything.’
Open-handed though he normally was, he found this demand excessive and almost nauseating.
‘So that’s what you want,’ he said. ‘You’ll get nothing from me.’
He whipped up his horse and drove on.
He would have liked to make up the time he had lost in Hesdin. The little horse was sturdy and very willing, but the month was February, there had been rain and the roads were in a bad state. Moreover this gig was heavy and sluggish compared with the tilbury and there were a great many hills. It took him nearly four hours to reach Saint-Pol, a distance of perhaps fifteen miles.
He had the horse unharnessed and taken round to the stable at the first inn he came to, and, as he had promised Scaufflaire, he watched while it was fed. His thoughts were sombre and confused.
The innkeeper’s wife came out to the stable.
‘Is not Monsieur going to dine?’
‘Why yes,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’m hungry.’
She was a woman with a fresh, cheerful face. He followed her into a low-ceilinged room with oilcloth on the tables.
‘You must be quick,’ he said. ‘I have very little time.’
A plump Flemish maid hurriedly laid a place for him and he looked at her with a sense of reassurance.
‘That’s what’s wrong with me,’ he thought ‘I’ve had no breakfast.’
His meal was served. He snatched up a piece of bread, swallowed a mouthful, then put it down and ate no more. Turning to a carter at the next table he said:
‘Why is the bread here so bitter?’
The man was German and did not understand.
An hour later he had left Saint-Pol and was heading for Tinques, which is some twelve miles from Arras.
What were his thoughts during this part of the journey? As in the morning he watched the passing of trees, thatched roofs, tilled fields, the changing vistas appearing at every bend in the road, an occupation soothing to the spirit that may almost take the place of thought. Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and the each minute. Perhaps somewhere in the vague recesses of his mind he perceived parallels between this series of dissolving views and our human life. All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road … and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness it.
Twilight was gathering when the children coming out of school in Tinques saw the traveller enter the village. These were indeed the shortest days in the year. He did not stop in Tinques, and as he was leaving it a roadmender looked up and said:
‘That’s a very tired horse.’
The poor beast could indeed only manage a walk.
‘Are you going to Arras?’ the man asked.
‘Yes.’
‘At the rate you’re going you’ll be a long time getting there.’
He reined in the horse and asked: ‘How far is it?’
‘A good seven leagues.’
‘What! But the postal guide makes it five and a quarter.’
‘Ah, but the road’s up for repair. You’ll find it closed a quarter of an hour from here. You’ll have to go round. You turn left for Carency, you cross the river and then turn right when you get to Camblin. That’s the Mont-Saint-Eloy road, which goes to Arras.’
‘But it’s getting dark. I shall lose my way.’
‘You don’t live in these parts?’
‘No.’
‘And it’s all side-lanes. If you want my advice, Monsieur,’ said the roadman, ‘you’ll go back to Tinques and stop the night. There’s a good inn, and your horse is worn out. You can go on to Arras in the morning.’
‘But I have to be there this evening.’
‘Well, that’s different. All the same, you’d better go to the inn and hire an extra horse. The lad in charge will see you through the lanes.’
He followed this advice and turned back. Half an hour later he drove briskly past the same spot with a sturdy additional horse. A stable-boy acting as postillion was seated on the shaft of the gig.
But more time had been lost and it was now quite dark. The going in the lanes was very bad. The gig lurched from one rut to the next, but he said to the boy: ‘Keep up a trot and you’ll get a double tip.’
Then, at a particularly heavy lurch, the cross-tree broke.
‘I don’t see how we can go on,’ the lad said. ‘I’ve nothing to harness my horse to. These lanes are terrible after dark. If you’ll come back to Tinques for the night, Monsieur, we can be at Arras first thing in the morning.’
His reply was: ‘Have you a hank of cord and a knife?’
‘Yes.’
He cut a branch from the hedge and improvised a cross-tree. Another twenty minutes had been wasted, but they went on at a good pace.
The plain was misty with banks of fog drifting like smoke over the hilltops and whitish gleams amid the cloud. A wind from the sea set up a distant rumbling like the sound of someone moving furniture, a sense of awe filled the air, all life seemed to shiver in the darkness of the growing night.
The cold pierced through him. He had eaten nothing since the night before. And now he recalled another night-time journey, across the great plain on the outskirts of Digne. Eight years ago, and it might have been yesterday.
A distant church clock sounded and he asked:
‘What time is it?’
‘Seven, Monsieur. We shall be in Arras at eight, only three leagues more.’
Then for the first time, finding it strange that the thought had not already occurred to him, he reflected that perhaps all the effort he was making was useless. He did not even know what time the case was to be heard. He should at least have ascertained this. It was surely ridiculous to be rushing as he did without knowing whether he would get there in time. He began to make calculations. An assize court ordinarily began the day’s session at nine in the morning. This case would certainly not occupy it for long. The theft of the apples was a very small matter. Then there was the question of identity, a few depositions to be heard, little or nothing for the advocates to say. By the time he arrived it would surely be all over!
The boy whipped up the horses. They had crossed the river and left Mont-Saint-Eloy behind.
The night was darker still.
At that moment Fantine was in ecstasy.
She had passed a very restless night, coughing incessantly with a high fever; and she had had bad dreams. When the doctor called in the morning she was delirious. He had seemed much perturbed and had recommended that Monsieur Madeleine should be informed directly he returned.
Throughout the morning Fantine had been apathetic, saying very little and crumpling the bedclothes in her hand while under her breath she murmured figures which seemed to be calculations of distance. Her eyes were hollow and vacant, almost lifeless, but at moments they would light up and shine like stars. It would seem that as darkness approaches a light from Heaven shines for those who are about to leave the brightness of earth.
Each time Sister Simplice asked her how she felt she replied: ‘Quite well. I long to see Monsieur Madeleine.’
When, a few months previously, Fantine had put aside the last shreds of her modesty, her shame, and her happiness, she had been the shadow of her former self; but now she was its ghost. Physical deterioration had completed the work of spiritual sickness. The woman of twenty-five had a wrinkled forehead and flaccid cheeks, pinched nostrils and loosened teeth, a sallow face, a bony neck and wasted limbs, and there were grey threads mingled with her fair hair. Disease is a great simulator of age.
The doctor came again at midday, gave certain instructions, asked if Monsieur Madeleine had visited her, and shook his head.
Monsieur Madeleine was in the habit of calling at three o’clock, and since punctuality is a part of kindness he was always punctual. By half past two Fantine was beginning to grow agitated. In the next twenty minutes she asked a dozen times to be told the time.
Three o’clock sounded and at the third stroke she sat upright, although ordinarily she had scarcely the strength to move. Her yellowed, wasted hands were tightly clasped and the sister heard her utter a sigh that was like the lifting of a great weight. She sat looking towards the door.
But no one entered. The door did not open.
She remained thus for a quarter of an hour, with her eyes fixed on the door, motionless, as though holding her breath. The sister was afraid to speak. The church clock struck the quarter and she sank back against the pillows. She said nothing but again began crumpling the sheet in her hands.
Half an hour passed, an hour, and no one came. Each time the clock struck Fantine sat up and looked towards the door, and then sank back again.
What was in her mind was plain enough, but she spoke no person’s name, uttered no word of complaint or reproach. There was only her heartrending cough. It was as though a great shadow now oppressed her. Her cheeks had a livid pallor, her lips were blue. But at moments she smiled.
Five o’clock struck, and then the sister heard a very low and gentle murmur from her lips. ‘But since I shall be going tomorrow, it is wrong of him not to come today.’
Sister Simplice was herself surprised that Monsieur Madeleine should be so late.
Fantine lay gazing at the sky from her bed. She seemed to be trying to remember something, and suddenly she began to sing in a voice no louder than a breath. She sang an old cradle-song with which she used to lull her baby daughter to sleep and which she had never once recalled in the five years since they had been separated. It was a song of gaiety and happiness, of loss and grieving, and she sang it so movingly as to cause even a hospital nurse to weep. Sister Simplice, hardened as she was to the cruelty of life, felt the tears rise in her eyes.
The clock struck six but Fantine did not seem to hear it. She seemed to be taking no more notice of her surroundings.
Sister Simplice sent a serving-girl round to the factory to ask if the mayor had returned and if he would soon be coming to the infirmary. The girl was back in a few minutes. Fantine continued to lie motionless, seemingly absorbed in the thoughts running through her mind.
The girl whispered to Sister Simplice that Monsieur le maire had driven off before six that morning, despite the cold, in a light carriage drawn by a white horse. He had gone quite alone, no one knew where. There were people who said that he had been seen on the road to Arras, and others claimed to have passed him on the Paris road. His manner when he left had been as kindly as usual. He had simply told the old woman not to expect him back that night.
While the two women were thus conversing in undertones with their backs turned towards her, Fantine, with the sudden feverish vitality which in certain illnesses lends an appearance of health to the enfeeblement of death, had risen to her knees on the bed and, supporting herself with her clenched fists on the mattress, was listening with her head thrust through the gap in the curtains. Suddenly she cried:
‘You’re talking about Monsieur Madeleine! Why are you whispering? What is he doing? Why hasn’t he come?’
Her voice was so hoarse and rough that it might have been that of a man. The startled women swung round.
‘Answer me!’ cried Fantine.
The girl stammered: ‘The concierge says he can’t come today.’
‘Lie down, my child,’ said the sister. ‘You must keep calm.’
Without obeying, Fantine said loudly, in a voice that was at once imperious and heartrending:
‘He can’t come? Why not? You know the reason. You were talking about it. I want to know.’
The girl whispered to the nun, ‘Say he’s at a Council meeting.’
Sister Simplice blushed faintly; she was being urged to tell a lie. On the other hand, she felt that to tell the truth would be to deal Fantine a blow which might have serious consequences in her present state. But her hesitation was soon over. Gazing gravely and compassionately at Fantine she said:
‘The mayor has gone out of town.’
Fantine started up with shining eyes and sat back on her heels. There was a look of indescribable happiness on her ravaged face.
‘He’s gone out of town?’ she cried. ‘He’s gone for Cosette!’
She raised her arms above her head, her expression radiant and her lips moving in a silent prayer. After a little pause she said:
‘I’ll lie down again. I’ll do whatever I’m told. I behaved badly just now, I shouldn’t have shouted at you. I know it’s wrong to raise one’s voice, I hope you will forgive me. I’m happy now. God is kind to me and Monsieur Madeleine is kind. He has gone to Montfermeil to fetch my little Cosette.’
She lay back, helped the sister to rearrange the pillows and kissed the small silver cross hanging from her neck which the sister had given her.
‘You must rest, dear child,’ Sister Simplice said. ‘You mustn’t talk any more.’
Fantine reached out hot hands whose feverish dampness caused the sister a pang.
‘He’s gone in the direction of Paris, but he won’t need to go as far as that, Montfermeil is a little to the left before you get to Paris. When I asked him about Cosette yesterday he said, “Soon, soon”– do you remember? He wants to give me a surprise. He made me sign a letter for the Thénardiers. They’ll have to give her up, won’t they, now that they’ve been paid? People aren’t allowed to keep a child when everything’s been paid. Please, sister, don’t try to stop me talking, I’m so happy, I feel so well, I shall see Cosette again. I’m even hungry. It’s five years since I saw her. Oh, you don’t know the hold a child can have on you! She’ll be so angelic, you’ll see. She had tiny pink fingers, she’s going to have pretty hands, but of course then they were only baby hands. She’s seven now, quite a big girl, almost grown up. I call her Cosette, her real name is Euphrasie. You know, this morning I was looking at the dust on the mantelshelf and somehow I had the idea that I should soon be seeing her again. It’s wrong to go for years without seeing one’s child. We have to remember that life doesn’t last for ever. Oh, and it’s so good of Monsieur Madeleine to have gone for her! The weather’s very cold, isn’t it? I hope at least he has a good warm overcoat. And they’ll be here tomorrow, won’t they? Tomorrow is the great day. You must remind me to put on my lace bonnet. It’s a long way to Montfermeil. I came the whole way on foot, and it was hard. But the coaches go very fast. They’ll be here tomorrow. How far is it to Montfermeil?’
The sister, who had no notion of distance, replied: ‘I’m sure he’ll be here tomorrow.’
‘And I shall see Cosette! Tomorrow! Tomorrow! Oh, dear sister, I’m not ill any more. I’m beside myself with happiness. I could dance, if you asked me to.’
Anyone who had seen her a quarter of an hour earlier might well have been dumbfounded. Her face was flushed and glowing, her voice light and natural. From time to time she murmured to herself. A mother’s rejoicing is near to that of a child.
‘Well,’ the sister said, ‘now that you’re happy you must be obedient and not talk any more.’
Fantine said softly, ‘Yes, I must be good now that I’m getting my baby back,’ and then lay motionless and silent, only gazing about her with wide, ecstatic eyes. The sister drew the bed-curtains, hoping that she would fall asleep.
The doctor called again between seven and eight, and hearing no sound tip-toed to the bedside; but when he drew back the curtains he saw by the night-light that she was gazing calmly up at him.
‘They’ll make up a little bed for her beside mine, won’t they?’ she said. ‘As you see, there’s just room.’
He thought she was delirious and taking Sister Simplice aside listened while she told him what she knew of the facts, namely that Monsieur Madeleine was to be away for a day or two, and that she had not thought it necessary to undeceive the patient, who assumed that he had gone to Montfermeil – and indeed it was possible that he had. The doctor nodded and went back to the bed.
‘ I can say good morning to her when she wakes up,’ said Fantine. ‘And at night I’ll hear her breathing, the sweet lamb, and that will be a delight to me, because I don’t sleep very well myself.’
‘Give me your hand,’ the doctor said.
She held it out and suddenly laughed. ‘But of course! You don’t know. I’m better, doctor. I’m going to get well. Cosette will be here tomorrow.’
The doctor found to his surprise that her condition had indeed improved. The tension was less and the pulse stronger. A surge of renewed life seemed to have revived her exhausted body.
‘Didn’t the sister tell you?’ she said. ‘The mayor himself has gone to fetch my little girl.’
He counselled silence and freedom from all disturbance, and prescribed quinine and a soothing potion in case she should become feverish again during the night. As he was leaving he said to Sister Simplice:
‘There’s a real improvement. If by great good fortune the mayor really does bring the child back – well, who can say? One hears of astonishing cases. Great happiness can sometimes work miracles. This is an organic disease and far advanced, but these things are wrapped in mystery. Perhaps we shall save her after all.’
It was nearly eight when the gig passed under the gateway of the Hôtel de la Poste in Arras. The traveller got out, replying absently to the greetings of the inn servants; he sent away the extra horse and himself led the white horse round to the stable. Then he pushed open the door of a billiard-room on the ground floor and sat down at a small drinking-table. He had taken fourteen hours over a journey that he had hoped to make in six; but he could say in fairness to himself that the fault was not his, and in his heart he was not displeased.
The landlady entered.
‘Will Monsieur be stopping the night? Will he require dinner?’
He shook his head.
‘But the ostler says that your horse is tired out. It needs at least two days’ rest.’
He considered. ‘This is a posting-inn, I believe. There’s a post office?’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
She took him to the office, where he learned that there was a place vacant on the mail leaving that night for Montreuil-sur-mer, the seat beside the mail-man. He reserved it and paid. The clerk warned him that it would leave punctually at one o’clock in the morning.
He left the inn and walked into the town. He did not know Arras and the streets were dark; nevertheless, he seemed reluctant to ask the way. He crossed the little river Crinchon and found himself in a maze of narrow streets. A man came by with a lantern, and after hesitating he approached him, but only after first looking round as though to ensure that his question would not be overheard.
‘Monsieur, can you tell me the way to the Palais de Justice?’
‘You are new to the town, Monsieur?’ said the gentleman, who was elderly. ‘I can take you there because, as it happens, that is where I am going myself – or lather to the Prefecture. The law-courts are at present under repair and the Prefecture is being used instead.’
‘Is that where the assizes are held?’
‘Yes. Before the Revolution the present Prefecture was the Bishop’s Palace. Monsieur de Conzie, who was bishop in eighty-two, had a large hall built on to it. That is where cases are provisionally being heard.’ As they walked along together, he added, ‘Have you come to attend a trial? In that case you may be too late. As a rule the court rises at six.’
But when they reached the town square they found that the lights were still burning behind four tall windows in a large, gloomy building.
‘You’re in luck, Monsieur,’ the gentleman said. ‘Those are the windows of the assize court. They must be holding a late session, evidently some case has taken longer than was expected. Would it be the case you are interested in? A criminal trial, perhaps? Are you a witness?’
‘No,’ said the stranger, ‘I have not come about any particular case, simply to speak to one of the attorneys.’
‘Well, then,’ said the gentleman, ‘there is the door. You’ll find a doorkeeper. You have only to go up the main stairway.’
A few minutes later Madeleine found himself in a crowded room where a number of persons in legal attire were clustered in separate groups, talking in low voices.
The sight of these groups of black-robed gentlemen murmuring together on the threshold of a court of law is always a chilling one. Little charity or compassion emerges from their talk, which is principally concerned with guessing which way the verdict will go. They are like clusters of buzzing insects absorbed in the construction of dark edifices of their own.
The room, which was spacious and lighted only with a single lamp, had been an antechamber in the days of the bishopric and was now being put to a similar use. Wide double doors, at that moment closed, separated it from the Great Hall where the assize court was in session.
The place was so dark that Madeleine did not hesitate to address the first lawyer he encountered.
‘How is the case going, Monsieur?’ he asked.
‘It’s over.’
‘Over!’
The tone of his voice caused the lawyer to look at him.
‘Excuse me, Monsieur – are you a relative?’
‘No. I know no one here. And there was a conviction?’
‘Naturally. Nothing else was possible.’
‘What was the sentence?’
‘Hard labour for life.’
Madeleine’s next words were spoken in a voice so low that they could scarcely be heard.
‘And the question of identity –?’
‘Identity?’ said the lawyer. ‘But there was no question of identity. The case was perfectly straightforward. The woman had killed her child. The infanticide was proved, but the jury ruled out premeditation. She was condemned to life-imprisonment.’
‘A woman!’ said Madeleine.
‘Of course. The woman Limosin. But what did you have in mind?’
‘It doesn’t matter. But if the case is over why are the lights still on?’
‘They’re trying another case. It started a couple of hours ago.’
‘What case is that?’
‘Another simple one. A recidivist, an ex-convict, charged with theft. I forget the name. But a rascal, if ever I saw one. The mere look of him is enough to get him sent back to the galleys.’
‘Would it be possible, Monsieur, for me to get into the court-room?’
‘I very much doubt it. It’s very crowded. But there is a temporary adjournment and perhaps some people will be leaving. You might manage when the court resumes.’
‘Where does one go in?’
‘Through that door.’
The lawyer left him. In the two or three minutes of that conversation Madeleine had been assailed by every conceivable emotion. The lawyer’s casual words had pierced him like needles of ice and like shafts of fire. When he heard that the case was not yet over he had drawn a deep breath, but whether of relief or anguish he could not have said.
He drew near to several of the murmuring groups and listened to what they were saying.
The court had so much business before it that the presiding judge had decreed that these two relatively brief and simple cases should be disposed of on the one day. They had first taken the infanticide and were now dealing with the case of the ex-convict, the ‘old lag’. He was charged with stealing apples, but this had not been proved. What had been proved, however, was that he had served a long term of imprisonment in Toulon, and this was what made the matter serious. The examination of the accused was completed and the depositions of the witnesses had been heard, but there remained the pleas of the prosecutor and the defending attorney, and it was unlikely that the business would be over before midnight. The prosecutor was a very capable advocate – he seldom failed to ‘get his man’ – and was, moreover, a person of refinement who wrote poetry.
An usher was standing by the door leading to the court-room. Madeleine asked him:
‘Will this door soon be opened?’
‘It won’t be opened at all,’ the usher said.
‘Not even when the session is resumed? It’s adjourned for the moment, isn’t it?’
‘They have just resumed, but the door won’t be opened. The hall’s already full.’
‘You mean there’s not a single place?’
‘Not one. No one can be allowed in.’ Then the usher added: ‘As a matter of fact, there are one or two seats behind the president’s chair, but these are reserved for persons holding public office.’ After which he turned his back on him.
Madeleine withdrew and with a lowered head crossed the antechamber and started slowly down the stairway, pausing in deep preoccupation at every step. The violent inner conflict that had absorbed him since the previous evening was still unresolved; new aspects of the matter constantly occurred to him. When he reached the half-landing he leaned against the balustrade with his arms folded. Suddenly he unbuttoned his greatcoat, got out his pocket-book and a pencil, and by the light of the stairway lantern wrote hastily on a sheet of paper which he tore out of the pocket-book, ‘M. Madeleine, Mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer.’ He then ran up the stairs, thrust his way through the crowd in the antechamber, and handed the slip of paper to the usher, saying in an authoritative tone, ‘Kindly take this to the presiding judge.’
The usher glanced at the paper and obeyed.
Without being aware of it the mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer had acquired a degree of celebrity. His high reputation in the Lower Boulonnais had spread beyond the borders of that region into the neighbouring departments. Apart from the service he had rendered the town by reviving the jet industry, there was not one of the 141 communes comprising the administrative district of Montreuil-sur-mer that did not owe him something. The manufacture of tulle at Boulogne, and the textile industries at Frévent and Boubers-sur-Canche had all benefited by his financial assistance. The name of Madeleine was everywhere held in high esteem, and towns such as Arras and Douai envied the fortunate small town of Montreuil-sur-mer.
The Councillor of the King’s Court at Douai, who was presiding over the assize court at Arras, was therefore familiar with his name. When the usher, discreetly bending over his chair, handed him the slip of paper saying, ‘The gentleman would like to be present at the hearing,’ he at once nodded, scribbled a line on the bottom of the slip, and ordered him to be shown in.
The unhappy man himself had remained standing where the usher had left him, in the same oppressed attitude. The voice which now intruded on his thoughts was very different in tone from that of the haughty attendant who had turned his back on him a few minutes before. Bowing obsequiously, the usher said, ‘If your honour would be so good as to follow me,’ at the same time returning the slip of paper. Madeleine was near enough to the lamp to be able to read, ‘The President of the Court presents his compliments to Monsieur Madeleine.’ Crumpling the paper as though the words had left a bitter taste in his mouth, he followed the usher.
A minute or two later he was standing in a sombre, oak-panelled room lighted by two candles on a table with a green cloth. Before leaving him the usher had said, ‘This is the judges’ room. The door with the brass knob leads directly into the court-room. Monsieur will find himself behind the judge’s chair.’ The words were mingled in his mind with a vague recollection of passages and stairways along which they had passed.
He was now alone. This was the supreme moment. He strove to collect his thoughts and could not do so. It is precisely in those moments when we have most need to grasp the painful realities of life that our thoughts are most apt to lose their coherence. He was in the room where the judges retired to consult together and decide upon their verdict, and he gazed round it in a kind of apathy, the quiet, ominous room where so many lives had been shattered, where presently his own name would be spoken and his fate decided. He stared at the wall in inward contemplation, amazed that he should be the man standing in that room.
He had eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, he had been shaken by the jolting of the gig, but he felt none of this; he was not conscious of feeling anything.
Hanging on the wall was a framed letter written by Jean-Nicolas Pache, Mayor of Paris under the Revolution and author of the slogan, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death’, in which Pache sent the local Commune a list of former ministers and deputies held under arrest in their homes. From the care with which Madeleine studied this letter, reading it several times, it might have been thought that he found it of particular interest. In fact, he was not aware of reading it; he was thinking about Fantine and the child Cosette.
Turning abstractedly away, his eyes fell on the brass handle of the door leading to the court-room. He had almost forgotten that door. He glanced casually at the handle and then his gaze returned to it, becoming wide and fixed, filled with a kind of terror. Beads of sweat formed on his scalp and rolled down his temples.
With a sudden start, that gesture of mingled authority and rebellion which says so plainly, ‘Who says I must?’, he turned away abruptly, crossed over to the door by which he had entered, opened it and went out. He found himself in a long, narrow passage with flights of steps, doorways, and several turns, lighted here and there by dim lamps like those in a sick-room – the passage along which he had come. He drew breath and stood listening. There was no sound to be heard, ahead of him or behind. He began to run as though he were pursued.
After turning several corners he paused again to listen. The same silence enclosed him, the same darkness. He was out of breath. He staggered and leaned against the stone wall, finding it cold to the touch. The sweat was chilled on his forehead. He shivered and stood upright.
And there, standing in shadow, shivering with cold and perhaps something else, he stayed considering. He had been thinking all that day and all the previous night. There was nothing left in him except a voice that said, ‘Alas!’
A quarter of an hour passed. At length he bowed his head and sighed in anguish, and with his arms limply hanging, turned back. He walked slowly as though overpowered, as though someone had caught and seized him as he fled.
He re-entered the judges’ room, and the first thing that caught his eye was the polished brass door-handle, shining like a baleful star. He stared at it as a lamb might stare at a beast of prey. He could not take his eyes off it. At intervals he moved a step nearer to the door.
Had he listened he would have heard a confused murmur of voices coming from the adjoining room; but he did not listen, and heard nothing.
Suddenly, and without knowing how it happened, he found himself standing at the door. He seized the handle with a convulsive movement and the door opened.
He was in the court-room.
Closing the door mechanically behind him, he stood observing the scene.
This place, where the meticulous and solemn drama of criminal trial was being enacted in the presence of a crowded audience, was large and dimly lighted, filled at moments with the buzz of voices, and at moments profoundly silent. At the end where he was standing a number of bored-looking magistrates in robes were biting their nails or sitting with closed eyes. At the other end was a crowd of ragged spectators, lawyers in casual attitudes, and soldiers with hard, bold faces. Old and stained wainscoting, a grimy ceiling, tables draped with yellowed green baize, doors blackened with handprints, tavern lamps hanging from nails knocked into the woodwork and candles in brass candlesticks on the tables. Darkness, ugliness, and melancholy, but all pervaded with a sense of lofty austerity, a consciousness of the great human proceeding that we call law and the divine proceeding that is called justice.
No one paid any attention to him. All eyes were directed to a single point, a wooden bench with a small door behind it, set against one wall The bench was lighted by candles and on it a man was seated, flanked by two gendarmes.
This was the man.
Madeleine had no need to seek him out. His eyes went instinctively towards him as though he had known in advance where he would be. And he seemed to be looking at himself grown old, not wholly similar in feature, but with the posture and general aspect, the unkempt hair, the wary, restless eyes, the smock – the man he had been when, with a heart filled with hatred and a mind burdened with the hideous memory of nineteen years’ imprisonment, he had come to Digne.
He thought with a shudder, ‘Oh, God, am I to become that again?’
The man, who was at least sixty and looked dull-witted and furtive, conveyed a general impression of coarseness.
Room had been made for Madeleine when he entered. The presiding judge had looked round, and realizing that this must be the mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer, had bowed his head in greeting. The advocate-general, whose official duties had several times brought him to the town, recognized Monsieur Madeleine and also saluted him. He was scarcely aware of these courtesies. He was staring about him, stupefied.
He had seen all this before, the judges, the clerk, the gendarmes, the crowd of curious, unfeeling faces. He had seen it twenty-seven years ago and now he was seeing it again, no longer a nightmare haunting his memory but the thing itself, gendarmes and judges, the assembly of flesh-and-blood humanity; he was reliving in dreadful truth, all that was most monstrous in his past. The past loomed like a gulf before him, and he closed his eyes in horror, crying in the depths of his soul, ‘Never!’
And by a tragic freak of chance which so confounded his mind that he felt he must be going mad, he saw another man standing in his place, assumed by everyone to be Jean Valjean.
Everything was the same, the paraphernalia of the law, the lateness of the hour – even the faces of judges, gendarmes, and spectators seemed scarcely to have changed. Only one thing was different: a crucifix hung on the wall above the presiding judge’s head, and this had been lacking in court-rooms at the time of his own trial. He had been tried in the absence of God.
There was a chair behind him and he sat down, terrified by the thought that someone might notice him. A pile of documents on the judge’s table hid him from the court when he sat, so that he could observe without being seen. By degrees his wits returned to him and his sense of reality; he became calm enough to listen.
Among the jurymen was M. Bamatabois. Madeleine looked for Javert but could not see him, the witnesses’ bench being hidden from his view by the clerk’s table, and the hall, in any case, being poorly lighted.
He had entered at the moment when the accused man’s advocate was concluding his speech for the defence, amid an attentive silence. The hearing had lasted three hours. For three hours the audience had watched a man, a stranger to the locality, an abject creature who was either profoundly stupid or profoundly cunning, crumble beneath the weight of a terrible probability. What was known of him? The witnesses who had been heard during the preliminary inquiry had been unanimous in their testimony, and other facts had emerged during the trial. The argument of the prosecution was as follows: ‘The accused is not merely a petty thief who has been caught stealing fruit, but a highly dangerous ruffian, an ex-convict who has broken parole, a criminal named Jean Valjean who has long been sought by the law. Directly after being released from imprisonment in Toulon he committed a highway robbery with the use of force on the person of a boy named Petit-Gervais, a crime under Article 383 of the Penal Code for which we reserve the right to prosecute him when his identity has been legally established. He has now committed another theft. It is a case of recidivism. Convict him of this latest crime and he will in due course be tried for the earlier one’ … The extent of the charge, and the unanimity of the witnesses, seemed to cause the accused astonishment more than any other emotion. He made negative gestures, or stared up at the ceiling, expressing himself with difficulty and replying awkwardly to the questions put to him; but his whole attitude was one of denial. He was like a half-wit in the presence of the keen minds arrayed against him, and like a foreigner in this society that had him in its grasp. And the case against him was growing steadily stronger, the likelihood of conviction steadily increasing, so that the spectators seemed more conscious of the fate that threatened him than he was himself. Even the possibility of a death-sentence, if his identity was established and he was convicted of the robbery of Petit-Gervais, could not be ruled out. What manner of man was he? What was the reason for his apparent indifference? Was it due to imbecility or to cunning? Did he understand too much, or nothing at all? These were, the questions that puzzled the spectators and seemed to divide the jury. The affair was at once ugly and mystifying, its drama not just sombre but obscure.
The defending attorney had pleaded, not ineffectively, in that language of the provinces which has long been the eloquence of the court-room, formerly used by all advocates both in Paris and elsewhere, and now the classic mode, rarely heard except on the lips of speakers at the bar, who delight in its impressive sonority and rolling periods. It is a language in which a husband or wife is always a ‘spouse’, Paris ‘the centre of art and civilization’, the king ‘the monarch’, a bishop ‘a saintly pontiff’, a theatre ‘a temple of Melpomene’, a concert ‘a musical occasion’, newspaper errors ‘imposture spreading its venom through the columns of a certain journal’, and so on … Beginning with the theft of the apples, a matter difficult of treatment in lofty terms, the defending attorney argued that this was not conclusively proved. No one had seen his client (whom, as his advocate, he persisted in calling Champmathieu) climb the wall or break a branch off the tree. He had been caught in possession of the branch (which the speaker preferred to call ‘the fruitful bough’) but claimed that he had found it on the ground and picked it up. Where was the evidence to the contrary? Undoubtedly the wall had been climbed and a branch broken off, and no doubt the marauder had flung it away in panic. Certainly there had been a marauder, but what proof was there that it was Champmathieu? There was simply the fact that Champmathieu was an ex-convict This his defender did not deny, since it appeared to be established. The accused had lived in Faverolles, he had been a tree-pruner, and the name Champmathieu might originally have been Jean Mathieu. All this was true, and moreover four witnesses had positively identified the man Champmathieu with the convict Jean Valjean. The defence had nothing to oppose to this except the man’s own denial. But supposing him to be an ex-convict, did this prove that he had stolen the apples? It was at the best a presumption. Certainly the accused – and the defence must ‘in good faith’ concede as much – had adopted an unfortunate attitude. He had persisted in denying everything, not only the theft of the apples but also the fact that he had a prison record. It would have served him better to give way on the latter point, since the admission would certainly have rendered the court more disposed to lenience. He had been advised of this but had stubbornly refused to accept the advice, no doubt believing that by denying everything he could save everything. It was a grave error, but surely the man’s lack of intelligence must be taken into account. He was clearly stupid. A long term of imprisonment and the vagabond life he had led since his release had further dulled his wits. Was he to be condemned for this? As to the matter of Petit-Gervais, since it did not enter into the present case the defence was not called upon to discuss it. The attorney concluded with a strong plea to the jury and the bench that if they were satisfied that the accused was Jean Valjean, he should be subjected only to the penalties applying to a released convict who has broken parole, not to the terrible chastisement inflicted on a recidivist felon.
The advocate-general then put the case for the prosecution with the florid vehemence that prosecuting attorneys are accustomed to use.
Complimenting the defending attorney on his ‘good faith’, he proceeded shrewdly to turn it to advantage. The defence appeared to accept that the accused was Jean Valjean, and since this was conceded to the prosecution it need not be further discussed. With an adroit change of subject the prosecutor launched into a thunderous attack on the immorality of writers of the romantic school, now becoming known to certain ‘ultra’ journals of the extreme right as the ‘satanic school’, to whose pernicious influence he attributed the misdeeds of Champmathieu, that is to say, Jean Valjean. Having exhausted this subject he came to Valjean himself. What kind of man was he? An outrageous villain, a monster of depravity, and so on … The model for invective of this kind is to be found in the story told by Theramène in Racine’s Phèdre, which does nothing for the play but has been of the greatest value to court-room orators, causing juries and spectators to ‘shudder’. With an eye on the columns of the Journal de la Préfecture, the prosecutor worked up to a masterly peroration. This was the man, this vagabond whose life had been one of crime and whose term of imprisonment had done nothing to improve his character, as was evidenced by his assault on the boy Petit-Gervais – this was the man who, being caught on the public highway in flagrante delicto, had denied everything, the act of trespass, the theft and even his own name. Apart from the mass of corroborative evidence which need not here be cited, he had been recognized by four witnesses – by Javert, the incorruptible inspector of police, and by three of his former comrades in infamy, the felons Brevet, Chenildieu, and Cochepaille. And what had he to say to this overwhelming testimony? He simply denied it. The brazen impudence! Members of the jury, in the name of justice… And so on …
The accused had listened open-mouthed, in a sort of stupefaction not unmixed with awe. He was evidently amazed that any man could talk so fluently. In the more impassioned moments, when eloquence burst its bonds and the stream of epithets poured over him like a flood, he had gently wagged his head from side to side in the mute and melancholy protest which was all he had allowed himself throughout the trial. The spectators nearest him several times heard him murmur, ‘This is what comes of not asking Monsieur Baloup.’
The prosecutor had drawn the jury’s attention to this ‘sullen attitude’ which, he said, was evidently deliberate, not due to stupidity but to craftiness and cunning and the habit of evading the law, and which shed its own light on the ‘profound perversity’ of the accused. Reserving the case of Petit-Gervais for future consideration, he demanded the full penalty prescribed by the law, which, as matters then stood, was penal servitude for life.
The defending attorney, rising to make his concluding speech, began by congratulating the advocate-general on his ‘admirable eloquence’. He went on to do his best, but weakly, evidently feeling that the ground had been cut from under his feet.
It was time for the case to be concluded. Ordering the accused to rise, the presiding judge put the formal question to him: ‘Have you anything to add in your defence?’
The man stood twisting a grimy cap in his hands, seeming not to have heard. The judge repeated the question.
This time the man heard and seemed to understand. He started like someone awakening out of sleep, stared about him at the onlookers, the gendarmes, his attorney, the jury and the judges, rested a huge fist on the wooden rail in front of his bench, and with his eyes fixed on the prosecutor began to speak. It was like an eruption, a flood of frantic, incoherent words jostling as they exploded from his mouth.
‘I have this to say. I was a wheelwright in Paris and I worked for Monsieur Baloup. It was a hard life. A wheelwright always works out of doors, in a yard or an open shed, never a closed one, because he has to have room, you see. In winter you flap your arms to keep warm, but the bosses don’t like that because it wastes time. It’s rough, handling metal when there’s ice between the cobbles, it wears a man out. You grow old before your time, you may be done for at forty. I was fifty-three and I found it very rough, and the other men, they’re hard on you, “old bones” they say. All I got was thirty sous a day, less than the proper rate because I was old. My daughter was a washerwoman down by the river. She earned a bit that way and between the two of us we got along. It was hard on her too, bent over a washtub, soaked to the waist rain or shine and the wind cutting into you. Even if it’s freezing you have to get the washing done – there are folk who haven’t got many clothes, they’re waiting for you to finish, so you have to keep at it or you’d lose customers. The tubs leak and you’re soaked through to your petticoats. She worked at the Enfants-Rouges laundry as well, where there’s water laid on. You don’t wash at a tub but straight under the tap and rinse the things in a trough. At least it’s indoors, so you’re warmer, but there’s all that steam from the hot water that hurts your eyes. She’d come back at seven dead tired and go straight to bed. Her husband used to beat her. She’s dead now. We weren’t very happy. She was a good girl, steady-going, never any fun. I remember one holiday, Mardi Gras it was, she went to bed at eight. That was our life. I’m telling the truth. You can ask anyone. Well, of course, it’s silly to say that. Paris is like a swamp. Who ever heard of Père Champmathieu? But there’s Monsieur Baloup. You can ask him. I don’t know what else you expect me to say.’
He fell silent but remained standing. He had talked rapidly in a loud, harsh voice, hoarse and uncouth, and with a kind of exasperated simplicity. Once he had paused to nod to someone among the spectators. The string of random affirmations, coming jerkily like a series of hiccoughs, had each been accompanied by a gesture of his hand like that of a man cutting wood. When he had finished the audience burst out laughing. He gazed about him, not understanding, and then laughed himself.
This did him no good.
The presiding judge, a considerate and well-meaning man, then spoke.
He first reminded the jury that his Monsieur Baloup ‘at one time a master wheelwright in Paris, for whom the accused claims to have worked’ was not available as a witness: he had gone bankrupt and could not be found. Then, turning to the accused and advising him to listen carefully, he said: ‘Your position is one which must cause you to think twice. You are the object of very serious suspicions. In your own interest I will ask you for the last time to give the court a plain answer to these questions. First, did you or did you not climb the wall of the Pierron smallholding, break a branch off a tree and steal the apples – in other words, commit the crime of theft with illegal entry? And secondly, are you or are you not the released convict, Jean Valjean?’
The accused shook his head in the manner of a man who understands and knows what he intends to say. Turning to face the judge, he opened his mouth and began:
‘In the first place –’
But then he looked down at his cap and up at the ceiling and was silent.
‘Listen to me,’ the prosecutor said sternly. ‘You refuse to answer questions, and your refusal in itself condemns you. It is apparent that your name is not Champmathieu. You are the convict Jean Valjean who at one time went by the name of Jean Mathieu, your mother’s name, and you were born in Faverolles, where you were a tree-pruner. It is also clear that you stole the apples from the Pierron property. The jury cannot fail to draw this conclusion.’
The man had re-seated himself. But now he rose abruptly and cried:
‘You’re wicked, that’s what you are! That’s what I was trying to say, only I couldn’t find the words. I’m one of those that don’t eat every day. I was on my way on foot from Ailly where there were floods and the countryside swamped and nothing but mud and a few bushes at the roadside, and there was this branch with apples lying on the ground and I picked it up not meaning any harm. So I’ve spent three months in prison being chivvied and now you’re all against me and telling me to answer your questions and the gendarme, who’s all right, he keeps nudging me in the ribs and saying, “Go on – answer.” But I don’t know how to say things, I never had any schooling, I’m one of the poor. That’s what you don’t understand. I never stole anything, I just picked up something I found lying on the ground. You keep talking about Jean Valjean and Jean Mathieu. I don’t know who they are. They’re village people. I worked for Monsieur Baloup in the Boulevard de l’Hôpital and my name’s Champmathieu. You’re very clever, telling me where I was born, because it’s more than I know. Not everyone has the luck to be born in a house. I think my father and mother were tramps, but I don’t know for sure. When I was a kid they called me little Champmathieu and now I’m old Champmathieu. That’s my baptismal name and you can make what you like of it. I’ve been in Auvergne and I’ve been in Faverolles, but can’t a man go places without being a convict? I never stole anything. I’m Champmathieu and I worked for Monsieur Baloup and I lived in Paris. You make me tired with all your questions. Why does everyone have to pick on me?’
The prosecutor had remained standing. He now addressed the presiding judge.
‘Monsieur le président, in view of the confused but shrewdly calculated denials on the part of the accused, who is trying to pass himself off as an idiot but will not succeed in doing so, I request the Court’s permission to recall the witnesses Brevet, Cochepaille, and Chenildieu and Inspector Javert, so that they may reaffirm their testimony identifying the prisoner with the convict Jean Valjean.’
‘I must remind you,’ said the president, ‘that Inspector Javert is no longer in Court. With the Court’s permission, and with the consent of both the prosecution and the defence, he has returned to his duties in Montreuil-sur-mer.’
‘I stand corrected, Monsieur le président. In the absence of Inspector Javert I will remind the jury of what he said in this court a short time ago. Javert is a man highly respected for his personal probity and strict performance of his duties. His deposition was as follows: “I have no need to rely on circumstantial or material evidence in refuting the denials of the accused. I recognize him perfectly. His name is not Champmathieu. He is a highly dangerous ex-convict named Jean Valjean who was very reluctantly released at the end of his sentence. He had served nineteen years’ hard labour for robbery with violence. He made five or six attempts to escape. Apart from the Petit-Gervais and Pierron robberies, I suspect him of having robbed his lordship the late Bishop of Digne. I saw him frequently when I was in the prison service in Toulon and, I repeat, I recognize him perfectly.”’
This very positive affirmation appeared to make a deep impression on both the public and the jury. In the absence of Javert, the prosecutor demanded the recall of the three other witnesses so that they might again be formally questioned. The presiding judge gave the order and a minute later the prisoner Brevet was brought back into court escorted by a gendarme.
Brevet was clad in the black and grey smock of the central prisons. He was a man of about sixty whose appearance suggested both the man of affairs and the rogue, two things that sometimes go together. He had become some sort of turnkey in the prison to which his latest misdeeds had brought him, being, in the words of the authorities, ‘a man who likes to make himself useful’, and the almoner reported favourably on his religious beliefs. This, it must be remembered, was under the Restoration.
‘Brevet,’ said the president, ‘you are under a shameful sentence and cannot give testimony on oath.’ Brevet lowered his eyes. ‘However, even a man thus degraded by the law may, in God’s mercy, retain some sense of honesty and justice, and it is to this that I am appealing. If it still exists in you, as I trust it does, you will reflect very carefully before answering. You have to consider, on the one hand, the man whom your answer may destroy, and on the other hand the cause of justice which it may serve. This is a critical moment. You may have been mistaken … The accused man will rise … Brevet, look hard at the man in the dock and tell the Court if in all conscience you still recognize him as your former prison-mate, Jean Valjean.’
Brevet did as required and then said:
‘Yes, Monsieur le président, I do. I was the first to recognize him and I stick to it. That is Jean Valjean, who came to Toulon in 1796 and went out in 1815.1 went out a year later. He looks dull-witted now, but that is due to age; he looked crafty enough in prison. I positively recognize him.’
‘You can sit down,’ said the judge. ‘The accused will remain standing.’
Chenildieu was then brought in, a convict under life-sentence as his red smock and green cap indicated, who had been fetched from Toulon to testify at this trial. He was a small man of about fifty with a yellow, wrinkled face and an impudent expression, whose physical aspect suggested some sort of nervous weakness but whose gaze contained a hint of immense will-power. His fellow-prisoners had nicknamed him ‘Godless’. When the judge, addressing him in the same terms that he had used to Brevet, reminded him that his condition deprived him of the right to take the oath, he looked up and gazed sternly at the spectators; and when asked if he still recognized the accused he burst into laughter.
‘How could I help recognizing him? We did five years on the same chain. What’s the trouble, mate – you sulking?’
‘Sit down,’ said the judge.
Then came Cochepaille, also under life-sentence, a peasant from Lourdes who had become an outlaw in the Pyrenees. From pasturing sheep in the mountains he had drifted into brigandage, and in his general aspect he was no less ruffianly and even more stupid than the accused. He was one of those unfortunates shaped by nature to be wild animals and turned by society into gaolbirds.
The judge, with the same solemn invocation, put the same question to him and he answered promptly:
‘It’s Jean Valjean all right. We used to call him “Jean-the-crow-bar” on account of he was so strong.’
Each of the three affirmations, so clearly uttered in good faith, had drawn from the spectators a murmur of increasing volume and hostility towards the accused. The prisoner himself had listened to them with that air of astonishment which, according to the prosecution, was his principal weapon of defence. The gendarmes standing on either side of him heard him mutter after the first, ‘Well, that’s one!’ After the second he said more loudly, and seemingly with a grim satisfaction, ‘Fine!’ And after the third he exclaimed, ‘Famous!’
The judge looked at him.
‘Prisoner at the bar, you have heard this testimony. What have you to say?’
He replied: ‘I say it’s famous!’
There was something like a roar from the audience, in which the jury came near to joining. The case was clearly hopeless.
‘The ushers will call for silence,’ said the presiding judge. ‘I am about to pronounce sentence.’
But at this moment there was a movement behind the bench and a voice cried:
‘Brevet, Chenildieu, and Cochepaille, I want you to look at me!’
All eyes turned in the direction of this voice, which was so grief-stricken, so terrible, that it chilled the hearts of all who heard it. A man who had been seated among the privileged spectators behind the judges had risen to his feet. Opening the gate in the low rail separating the bench from the body of the court, he strode to the centre of the court-room. The presiding judge, the prosecutor, Monsieur Bamatabois, and twenty others recognized him and exclaimed with one voice:
‘Monsieur Madeleine!’
It was indeed he. The light from the clerk’s lamp fell upon his face. He was holding his hat in his hand, his clothes were neat, his greatcoat carefully buttoned. He was very pale and trembled slightly. His hair, which had still been grey when he arrived in Arras, was now quite white. It had gone white during the hour that he had been in the court-room.
The profound sensation caused by his sudden appearance was followed by a bewildered silence. So great was the contrast between the anguish in the voice and the calm outward aspect of the man that it was hard to believe that it was he who had spoken. But the pause was only brief. Before the judge or prosecutor could speak, or any gendarme or usher make a movement, the man who was still known to everyone as Monsieur Madeleine advanced towards the three witnesses.
‘Do you not recognize me?’ he asked.
They shook their heads, staring at him in astonishment. The startled Cochepaille gave him a military salute. Monsieur Madeleine turned to face the court and said quietly:
‘Gentlemen of the jury, you must acquit the accused. I must ask the court to order my arrest. I am the man you are looking for. I am Jean Valjean.’
No one breathed. The first stir of amazement was followed by a deathly stillness. The hall was seized with the kind of religious awe that grips a crowd in the presence of a great event, but the face of the presiding judge wore an expression of sympathy and sadness. After exchanging gestures with the prosecutor and a few low-spoken words with his fellow-judges, he addressed the court-room in a tone that everyone understood:
‘Is there a doctor present?’
The prosecutor spoke.
‘Gentlemen of the jury, this very strange and disturbing incident must inspire in us all sentiments which I have no need to express. We all know the mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer, the highly respected Monsieur Madeleine, at least by repute. If there is a doctor present I wish to associate myself with the bench in requesting him to attend to the gentleman, and see that he gets safely home.’
He seemed about to say more, but Madeleine himself cut him short, speaking in a voice of quiet authority. What follows are the words he used, the exact words, as they were recorded immediately after the trial and as they must linger in the minds of everyone who heard them, nearly forty years ago.
‘I am grateful to you, Monsieur l’avocat général, but I am not mad, as you will see. You are on the point of committing a grave error, whereas I am performing an act of public duty. This man must be released. I am that wretched convict. What I now tell you is the truth, and it is sufficient for me that God is my witness. Here I am – you have only to take me. I did the best I could. I changed my name, I grew rich and became mayor; I sought to reinstate myself in the ranks of honest men. But it seems that it is not to be. I need not, at this point, tell you the whole story of my life, it will become known in due course. But it is true that I robbed the Bishop of Digne and the boy Petit-Gervais. You are right in supposing that Jean Valjean was a very evil wretch, although perhaps the fault was not wholly his. It is not for a man so lowly to remonstrate with Divine Providence or seek to advise society, but the degradation from which I sought to escape is none the less an evil thing. It is gaol that makes the gaolbird, and this is something that you must bear in mind. Before going to prison I was a peasant with very little intelligence, almost an idiot. It was prison that changed me. I had been stupid but I grew malignant, like a smouldering log that bursts into flame. Goodness and compassion saved me after brutality had come near to destroying me. But these are things that I cannot expect you to understand. You will find in the hearth in the place where I live the forty-sou piece I stole from Petit-Gervais. I have nothing to add. You have only to arrest me. But I see the advocate-general shake his head. You do not believe me, you think me mad. This greatly distresses me. At the least, an innocent man must not be convicted. It is a pity Javert is not here, for he would recognize me. These men say that they do not, but we shall see.’
The gentleness and melancholy of his voice was such as no words can convey. He turned to the three convicts.
‘I recognize you, Brevet. Do you remember –’ he paused for an instant, ‘– do you remember the braces you used to wear, with a check pattern?’
Brevet gave a start of surprise and stared at him wide-eyed. He went on:
‘And you, Chenildieu. They called you “Godless” – it was the name you gave yourself. You have a bad scar on your right shoulder. You held it against a hot stove, trying to burn away the letters T.F.P. which were branded on it, but they are still visible. Is that not so?’
‘It’s the truth,’ said Chenildieu.
He turned to Cochepaille.
‘At the bend of your left arm, Cochepaille, there’s a date in blue lettering tattooed with gunpowder. It is the date of the Emperor’s landing at Cannes – 1 March 1815. Pull up your sleeve.’
Cochepaille did so, and a gendarme held a lantern so that its light fell on his bare arm. The date was there.
Madeleine then turned to face the court with a smile that still wrings the hearts of those who remember it, a smile of triumph and of utter despair.
‘Now do you believe that I am Jean Valjean?’
There were no longer judges, lawyers, or gendarmes in the place, but only intent eyes and deeply troubled hearts. No man considered the part he might be called upon to play. The prosecutor forgot that he was there to prosecute, the presiding judge that he was there to pass sentence, the defender that he was there to defend. And, most strikingly, no question was raised, no legal authority invoked. It is the quality of awesome events that they seize upon the soul and make all men participants. Perhaps no one in that place was fully conscious of his own feelings, and certainly no one said to himself that he was witnessing the splendour of a great light; but all were dazzled by it.
That this was Jean Valjean could no longer be doubted. The truth was manifest. His pathetic appearance in itself sufficed to explain what seemed inexplicable a few minutes before. Without the need of further enlightenment every person in that assembly, as though by an electric impulse, instantly perceived the simple nobility of this action on the part of a man who was surrendering himself in order that another might not suffer in his place. Before this overwhelming fact all lesser questions were set aside. It was an impulse that soon passed but for the moment it was irresistible.
‘I will trouble the Court no further,’ said Jean Valjean. ‘If I am not to be arrested at once I will leave. I have things to attend to. The Court knows who I am and where I am going, and can send for me when it chooses.’
He turned towards the door. No voice was raised, no arm outstretched to stay him. They stood aside to let him pass. He was invested at that moment with the hint of the divine which causes crowds to fall back in homage. He walked slowly. No one could say afterwards who had opened the door for him, but certainly it was open when he reached it. He turned and said to the prosecutor:
‘Monsieur, I am at your disposal.’
Then he said to the assembly as a whole:
‘You who are here present, you find me deserving of pity, do you not? For myself, when I consider what I came so near to doing, I think I am to be envied. But still I wish that none of this had happened.’
He went out and the door closed behind him as unobtrusively as it had opened.
It took the jury a very short time to acquit the man Champmathieu of the charge against him, and being at once released he went off in a state of total stupefaction, thinking all men mad and understanding nothing of what had transpired.