JEAN VALJEAN had been re-captured.
We may pass over the painful details and confine ourselves to reproducing two newspaper reports which appeared a few months after the events in Montreuil-sur-mer. The first, from the Drapeau Blanc, is dated 25 July 1823.
A district in the Pas-de-Calais has recently been the scene of a remarkable occurrence. A newcomer to the département named Madeleine had in the course of a few years, by the use of a new process, resuscitated an ancient local industry, the manufacture of jet beads and black glasswork. He made a fortune for himself and, it must be added, for the district, and in recognition of his public services was appointed mayor. The police presently discovered that this Monsieur Madeleine was none other than an ex-convict in breach of parole, sentenced for theft in 1796, whose name was Jean Valjean. He was re-imprisoned. It seems that before being arrested he contrived to withdraw from the banking house of M. Laffitte the sum of over half a million francs which he had placed there on deposit and which, it appears, he had acquired quite legitimately in the course of his trade. Where Jean Valjean concealed this money, before being sent back to the prison at Toulon, is not known.
The second report, which is rather more detailed, is taken from the Journal de Paris of the same date.
A released ex-convict named Jean Valjean was recently tried at the Assize Court of Var in circumstances worthy of attention. This rogue had succeeded in eluding the vigilance of the police. He had changed his name and contrived to get himself elected mayor of a small town in the north of the province where he had established an industrial enterprise of some importance. Eventually, thanks to the indefatigable zeal of the police authorities, he was exposed and arrested. He had a concubine, a woman of the town who died of shock on learning of his arrest. Thanks to his Herculean strength the villain was able to escape, but the police again laid hands on him in Paris three or four days later, when he was in the act of entering one of the small conveyances which run from the capital to the village of Montfermeil (Seine-et-Oise). It seems that he had profited by his period of liberty to withdraw a large sum of money deposited by him with one of our leading bankers, a sum of between six and seven hundred thousand francs. According to the prosecution he hid the money in a place known only to himself and the police have been unable to find it. However this may be, Jean Valjean was charged at the Assize Court of Var with an act of armed highway robbery committed some eight years ago on the person of one of those honest youngsters who, in the immortal lines of the Patriarch of Ferney,*
… De Savoie arrive tous les ans
Et dont la main legèrement essuie
Ces longs canaux engorgés par la suie.The criminal offered no defence. It was proved by the able and eloquent prosecuting attorney that the robbery was carried out with accomplices and that Jean Valjean was a member of a robber band then operating in the Midi. Accordingly, on being found guilty he was sentenced to death. He refused to exercise his right of appeal, but the King, in his immense clemency, commuted the sentence to one of hard labour for life. Jean Valjean was consigned at once to Toulon prison.
We may recall that Jean Valjean was strict in his religious observances. This caused certain liberal organs, Le Constitutionnel among them, to declare that the commutation of the sentence represented a triumph for the clerical party.
On his return to prison Jean Valjean was given a new number. He became No. 9430.
We may add, before dismissing the subject, that with the departure of Monsieur Madeleine, prosperity also departed from Montreuil-sur-mer. Everything that he had foreseen during his night of feverish indecision came to pass. With his going the spirit of the town was lost, and there ensued that squalid battle for the proceeds of a great career, that fatal dismembering of a going concern, which is of daily occurrence in obscure human affairs but has only once attracted the notice of history, when it happened after the death of Alexander. Lieutenants crown themselves kings; foremen set up as factory-owners; jealous rivalries arise. Madeleine’s large workshops were closed, the buildings fell in ruins and the workers were scattered. Some left the district, others found new work. Everything went forward on a small scale instead of on the grand scale, for gain instead of for the public good. Control at the centre gave place to cut-throat competition. Madeleine had inspired and directed everything, and without him it was every man for himself, conflict in place of the spirit of cooperation, malice in place of friendship, internecine hatreds in place of the founder’s goodwill towards all men. The threads woven by Madeleine were twisted and broken; organization became slovenly, the quality of the product suffered, buyers lost confidence, orders fell away; and this led to lower wages, unemployment, and bankruptcy. And nothing was left over for the poor. It all vanished.
The State itself became aware that something had gone wrong. Less than four years after the assize court verdict, which transformed Madeleine into Jean Valjean for the benefit of the penal system, the cost of tax-collection had doubled in the district of Montreuil-sur-mer. Monsieur de Villèle drew the attention of the Assembly to the fact in February 1827.
Before going further we must describe in some detail a singular incident which took place at about that time in the neighbourhood of Montfermeil, and which may have a bearing on certain conjectures on the part of the authorities.
There lingers in the district of Montfermeil a very ancient superstition which is the more curious and precious inasmuch as popular superstitions in the vicinity of Paris are as rare as aloes in Siberia. We are among those who respect everything that achieves this degree of rarity. This, then, is the Montfermeil superstition. They believe that the Devil has from time immemorial made use of their forest for the concealment of his hoarded wealth. The local good-wives declare that it is not unusual to encounter at dusk in remote parts of the woods a black-avised man looking like a carter or butcher, shod in clogs and clad in homespun, who is instantly recognizable by the fact that he wears large horns in place of a hat. There are three courses to pursue when the encounter takes place. The first is to go up to the man and speak to him. One then finds that he is an ordinary countryman whose face is dark because of the failing light, engaged not in digging a hole but in cutting grass for his cows, and carrying a dung-fork on his back, the prongs of which, sticking up behind his head, seem in the dusk to be growing out of it. The person who thus approaches him goes home and dies within a week. The second course is to wait until the man has dug his hole, filled it in and gone away; one then hurries to the spot and digs up the ‘treasure’ which, of course, he has buried there. In this case one dies within a month. The third course is not to look at the man or go near him, but to make off at full speed – one then dies within a year.
Since all three courses have their drawbacks, the second, which at least holds out the prospect of wealth, if only for a month, is the one most generally adopted. But it appears that men who have been so intrepid as to open the hole and attempt to rob the Devil have found the operation singularly unprofitable. Such, at least, is the report of local tradition as summarized in the two cryptic lines of dog-Latin written by the bad monk, Tryphon, who was something of a sorcerer and is now buried at the Abbaye de Saint-Georges de Bocherville, near Rouen, where toads breed on his grave. The searcher is confronted by a heavy task, for the hole as a rule is very deep. He sweats and toils throughout the night – for this is work that can only be done at night – soaking his shirt, burning out his candle, breaking his shovel; and when at length he gets to the bottom of the hole, what treasure does he find? In the words of warning left by Tryphon:
Fodit, et in fossa thesauros condit opaca
As, nummos, lapides, cadaver, simulacra, nihilque.
In other words, a penny-piece or perhaps a crown, a stone, a skeleton, a corpse, a spectral image folded in four like a sheet of paper in a wallet – or, sometimes, nothing at all. It appears that in our own time a powder-bag with bullets may also be found, or a greasy pack of cards obviously used by devils. Tryphon does not mention these latter items. He lived in the twelfth century, and the Devil, it seems, had not the wit to invent gunpowder before Francis Bacon, or playing cards before Charles VI. For the rest, whoever plays with the cards is certain to lose everything he possesses, and the powder has the characteristic that it makes the gun explode in its user’s face.
Shortly after the authorities had come to the conclusion that Jean Valjean, during his few days’ escape from captivity, had visited the district of Montfermeil, it was noticed in the village that an old road-mender named Boulatruelle had become strangely fascinated by the forest. He was a man who, it was understood, had served a prison sentence; he was kept under police observation, and since he could find no other work the municipality employed him at a reduced wage to mind the stretch of road between Gagny and Lagny.
Boulatruelle was not well thought of by the local people, being over-subservient, too humble, too ready to doff his cap to all and sundry, obsequious to the gendarmes and probably in league with the bands of footpads who lay in wait for travellers after dark. All that could be said in his favour was that he was given to drunkenness.
What had been observed was as follows:
For some time past Boulatruelle had taken to leaving his work of road-mending at an early hour and going off into the wood with his shovel. He was to be seen at dusk in the remotest clearings and the wildest places apparently searching for something and sometimes digging holes. Village women on their way through the wood at first mistook him for Beelzebub and then saw that he was Boulatruelle, which was scarcely more reassuring. He was evidently greatly put out by these encounters and made obvious efforts to conceal himself. His behaviour was altogether mysterious.
They said in the village: ‘Clearly the Devil has made an appearance and Boulatruelle saw him and is now searching for his secret hoard.’ The disciples of Voltaire wondered: ‘Will Boulatruelle catch the Devil, or will the Devil catch Boulatruelle?’ The old women frequently crossed themselves.
Eventually Boulatruelle ceased to scour the woods and returned to the orderly performance of his duties on the road. The subject was dropped.
But a few people remained interested, reflecting that, although there was probably no legendary treasure, there might yet be something behind the business, more substantial than supernatural banknotes, of which the road-mender had gleaned some knowledge. Foremost among these were the schoolmaster and the tavern-keeper, Thénardier, who made a point of being on friendly terms with everyone, even with Boulatruelle.
‘He’s been in prison, has he?’ said Thénardier. ‘Well, there’s no saying who’s been there or who’s going.’
The schoolmaster remarked one evening that in the old days the law would have inquired more closely into Boulatruelle’s doings in the woods, and that he would have been made to talk, by torture if necessary. If he had been put to the question by water he would not have held out for long.
‘Then,’ said Thénardier, ‘let us put him to the question by wine.’
So they had a party and plied the old man with drink. Boulatruelle drank enormously but said little, reconciling in a masterly degree the thirst of a toper with the discretion of a judge. At length, however, by dint of returning to the subject and seizing upon such hints as he let fall, Thénardier and the schoolmaster arrived at something like the following:
Early one morning, when Boulatruelle was passing through the wood on his way to work, he had seen a pick and shovel lying under a bush – ‘hidden, as you might say’. He had supposed them to be the property of Père Six-Fours, the water-carrier, and had thought no more about it; but that evening, without himself being seen since he was hidden behind a tree-trunk, he had watched a certain individual leave the road and plunge into the thickest part of the wood – a person who had no connection with that part of the world’ but whom he, Boulatruelle, had at one time known very well. Thénardier interpreted this as meaning ‘a fellow-prisoner’. Boulatruelle had stubbornly refused to name names. The man had been carrying a square object which might have been a large box or a small chest. Such was Boulatruelle’s astonishment that some minutes elapsed before he had the idea of following him, and by this time it was too late; the man had vanished into the undergrowth in the falling dusk and he could not catch up with him. So then he kept watch at the edge of the wood. There was a moon, he said. And after an hour or two the man reappeared, this time without the square object but carrying a pick and shovel. Boulatruelle had let him go without attempting to approach him, reflecting that the man was three times as strong as himself and armed with a pick, and would probably murder him if he found that he had been recognized. But the pick and shovel afforded a clue to what had been happening, which was confirmed when Boulatruelle went back to the thicket where he had seen them that morning, and found them gone. Evidently the man had been burying something, and since the box had been too small to contain a corpse Boulatruelle surmised that it must contain money.
Hence his researches. He had scoured the wood, inspecting every patch of ground that looked as though it might have been recently turned. But all in vain. He had found nothing.
So the subject ceased to interest the people of Montfermeil, except for a few goodwives who said: ‘You can be sure the Gagny road-mender didn’t make all that fuss for nothing. The Devil must certainly have been there.’
Towards the end of October of that year of 1823 the ship-of-the-line Orion, which was later to be used as a training vessel but at that time was attached to the Mediterranean Squadron, put into Toulon dockyard for repairs after a spell of heavy weather.
Her entry, damaged as she was by the recent storm, did not go unnoticed, for she was flying a flag entitling her to an eleven-gun salute, which she duly returned, making twenty-two guns in all. It has been estimated that in ceremonial of this kind, salutes to royalty and other distinguished personages, the opening and closing of harbours, guns fired at daybreak and sunset from ships and fortresses throughout the civilized world, some 150,000 cannons are uselessly discharged every twenty-four hours. At six francs a time this amounts to 900,000 francs a day, or 300 millions a year. A detail in passing. Meanwhile the poor continue to die of hunger.
The year 1823 was known to the Restoration as ‘the time of the Spanish war’. It was a war comprising many events in one and possessing many singular features. For the House of Bourbon it was a large-scale family affair, the French branch sustaining and defending the Madrid branch – that is to say, playing the part of elder brother. But the war was also a manifest return to our national tradition, complicated by a servile compliance with the wishes of the northern governments: the commander of the French forces, his Highness the Duc d’Angoulême, christened by the liberal sheets ‘the hero of Andujar’, contrived to display, within a triumphal posture somewhat contradicted by his pacific bearing, the very real age-old terrorism of the Holy Office at grips with the imaginary terrorism of the liberals and with the sans-culottes, now resuscitated, to the great dismay of dowagers, under the name of descamisados (shirtless). The war was monarchy resolutely opposing progress, described as ‘anarchy’; it was a harsh assault on the principles of 1789 and a European cry of ‘halt’ to French ideas that were spreading throughout the world. It was under the generalship of the heir to the French throne, a young man of royal birth, the Prince de Carignan, later known as plain Charles-Albert, enlisted in this crusade of kings against peoples as a volunteer, and wearing an ordinary grenadier’s uniform. The soldiers of the Empire again went to war, but under the white cockade, and saddened and eight years older. The tricolour flag was brandished abroad by a handful of Frenchmen, as the white flag had been waved at Coblentz thirty years before. Monks were to be found in our ranks; the spirit of liberty and progress was challenged by bayonets, and principles were mown down by gunfire. France destroyed by force of arms what she had created by force of spirit. For the rest – enemy leaders suborned, soldiers reluctant to fight, towns besieged by wealth, small military risk but always the danger of an explosion, as in the sudden invasion of a powder-factory; little bloodshed and little honour; disgrace for some and glory for no one … Such was that war, instigated by princes descended from Louis XIV and conducted by generals taught by Napoleon, sadly lacking in the lustre of grand warfare or grand policy.
There were a few feats of arms that deserved to be taken seriously: the capture of the Trocadero, for example, was a well executed military operation. But in general, let us repeat it, the trumpets of that war sounded a hollow note and History has shared the disinclination of France to regard it as a triumph. There was a smell of corruption. Officers who should have put up a fight surrendered too easily, more generals were won over than battles won, and the victorious troops returned home humiliated. A degrading war, with the words Banque de France inscribed in the folds of the flag. Veterans of the war of 1808, who had witnessed the terrible death-throes of Saragossa, looked askance at citadels that so promptly opened their gates, and sighed for Palafox.*
A more important point, and one especially deserving of emphasis, is that besides affronting the military spirit of France the war outraged the spirit of democracy. It was an essay in enslavement in which the French soldier, born of democracy, was required to forge a yoke for others. A shameful contradiction. France’s task is to arouse the soul of peoples, not to stifle it. From 1792 on, every revolution in Europe had been the French revolution. Liberty radiated from France, and this was a cosmic fact which only the blind failed to see – Napoleon himself had said it. So the war of 1823, an assault on the generous Spanish nation, was also an assault on the French revolution. The monstrous act committed by the French was committed under compulsion, for all the acts of armies, unless they be wars of liberation, are committed under compulsion. Passive obedience is the keynote. An army is a strange contrivance in which power is the sum of a vast total of impotence. That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.
For the Bourbons the war of 1823 was a disaster. They mistook it for a success. They had no notion of the danger that lies in attempting to crush ideas by military order, and they carried naïveté to the point of believing that they had strengthened their position by introducing into it the immense weakness of a crime. The spirit of double-dealing pervaded their policy. The events of 1830 had their origin in 1823. The success of the Spanish campaign became a justification for other violent escapades aimed at re-establishing the divine right of kings. Having restored absolute monarchy in Spain, France might do the same for her own monarchs. They made the fatal blunder of mistaking the discipline of the soldier for the consent of the nation. These are the delusions that destroy thrones. It does not do to let the senses fall asleep, whether in the shade of the sacred tree or in the shadow of an army.
To return to the ship Orion.
She had formed part of the French naval squadron patrolling the Mediterranean during the war, until, as we have said, bad weather obliged her to put into Toulon for repairs. The presence of a ship-of-the-line in a seaport is something that always attracts a crowd of onlookers. She was a big ship, and the crowd loves bigness.
A ship-of-the-line is among the most splendid of all human challenges to the forces of nature, combining as it does what is most weighty with what is lightest, since its business is with all the forms of matter, solid, liquid, and fluid, and it has to deal with all three at once. It has eleven claws of iron to grip the seabed, and more wings and antennae than the most elaborate of insects to seize and hold the wind. The breath it exhales from its hundred and twenty guns is like a great blast of trumpets proudly defying the lightning. The ocean tries to confuse it with the terrifying similarity of its waves, but it has a mind of its own, the compass, pointing steadfastly to the north; and on the darkest night its lanterns replace the stars. Thus it opposes rope and canvas to the winds, wood to the waters, iron, copper, and lead to the rocks, light to darkness, and a needle to immensity.
To grasp the huge extent of the components constituting a ship-of-the-line we need only to visit one of the covered dockyards, six storeys high, in Brest or Toulon, where the ship in process of building is displayed to us, as it were, under glass. That huge beam of wood is a spar, and the seemingly endless column of timber lying on the dockside is the mainmast. From its bedding in the hull to its top in the clouds it is sixty fathoms high, and three feet thick at its base. An English mainmast rises two hundred and seventeen feet above the ship’s water-line. The navy of our fore fathers used rope hawsers for its anchor, but today we use chains, and the coiled chain of a single anchor is four feet high and twenty feet wide. As for the amount of timber needed – the ship is a floating forest.
And all this, be it noted, refers to the man-of-war of forty years ago, a sailing-ship. Steam, which was then in its infancy, has brought added marvels. In these days the ship combining sail and screw is propelled by three thousand square metres of canvas and an engine of two thousand five hundred horsepower. But, setting aside these modern wonders, the old ships sailed by Christopher Columbus and de Ruyter were among the greatest masterpieces of man, inexhaustible in power as the heavens are in breath, purposeful amid the vast confusion of waves over which they moved and which they dominated.
Nevertheless it can happen that a sixty-foot spar or towering mast may be snapped like a twig by the violence of a squall, that huge anchors may be twisted like fish-hooks, that even the roar of the great guns may be lost in the howl of the tempest, and all that strength and majesty forced to submit to powers that are greater still. That so much splendour can be reduced to impotence is awe-inspiring to the minds of men, and so it happens that every seaport contains a crowd of idlers come to gaze at those marvellous contrivances for war and seafaring, without clearly knowing why. And so it was that every day and all day the quays and jetties of Toulon swarmed with onlookers having no other business than to contemplate the ship Orion.
The Orion had been a sick ship for some time. In the course of a long spell at sea her lower hull had become so fouled with barnacles as to rob her of half her speed. She had been dry-docked for scraping the previous year, and had then gone to sea again. But the scraping had weakened her timber-fastenings, eventually causing planks to start so that she began to make water, and a violent equinoctial gale in the latitude of the Balearics had further damaged her hull on the port side. She had accordingly returned to Toulon.
She was moored near the Arsenal, being still in commission and under repair. Her hull was not damaged on the starboard side but a few upper strakes had been removed, as the custom was, to let the air in.
One morning the crowd of onlookers witnessed an accident.
The crew were taking the sails off her. The man loosening the starboard peak of the main-topsail suddenly lost his balance. A cry of alarm rose from the watching crowd as they saw him reel and slip, clutching the foot-rope as he fell, first with one hand and then with both; and there he hung, with the sea a hideous distance below him. The shock had set the foot-rope wildly swinging and he dangled from it like a stone in a sling.
To go to his help would be to run an appalling risk. No member of the crew, which consisted of local fishermen recently pressed into service, was disposed to attempt it. Meanwhile the man was becoming exhausted. His agonized face could not be seen, but the writhings of his body, the arms horribly stretched, clearly showed it. His efforts to hoist himself up served only to increase the swinging of the rope. He uttered no sound, seeking to conserve his strength. The crowd waited, expecting nothing except the moment when he would relax his hold, and heads were turned away in order not to see. There are occasions when a length of rope, a pole, or the branch of a tree is life itself, and it is a terrible thing to see a living being lose his grip and fall like a ripe fruit.
But suddenly a man was seen climbing the rigging with the agility of a wildcat. He wore a red smock, which meant that he was a convict, and a green cap, which meant that he was serving a life sentence. As he reached the topsail-yard a gust of wind carried his cap away, revealing a head of white hair; he was not a young man.
It was learned later that the man was one of a labour gang brought in from the prison. At the first alarm, and seeing the reluctance of the crew to risk their lives, he had gone to the officer of the watch and asked permission to try to save the luckless seaman. When this was granted he had broken the chain welded to the manacle round his ankle with a single blow of a hammer, and then, snatching up a coil of rope, had started up the shrouds. No one had been struck at the time by the remarkable ease with which the chain had been broken. This was only remembered after the event.
In a remarkably short time he had reached the topsail-yard. Here he paused for a moment, evidently reviewing the situation, and those few seconds were to the spectators like an eternity. Then a sigh went up as he was seen to run along the yard. Making the rope fast to its further end, he swarmed down it, and the spectators suffered the agony of seeing two men suspended over the void instead of one. It was like watching a spider grapple with a fly, except that here the spider was bringing life, not death. Not a sound was to be heard; the watchers held their breath as though fearing to add the least impulse to the breeze that was buffeting the two men.
The convict at length drew level with the seaman, only just in time, for in another minute he must have relaxed his grip. Hanging on with one hand, the convict used the other to lash the bight of the rope securely round the man’s waist. Having done so he climbed back on to the yard and hauled the seaman up after him. He held him there for a moment to allow him to recover. Then, taking him in his arms, he walked with him along the yard to the masthead, whence he lowered him down to the cross-trees, where another member of the crew took charge of him.
And now the crowd burst into applause. Hardened prison-officers wept, women on the dockside embraced one another, and a cry of frenzied acclamation arose – ‘That man must be set free!’
The man, meanwhile, was making it a point of duty to return promptly to his labours. In order to do so the more rapidly he slid down the rigging and ran along one of the lower yards, while all eyes were fixed upon him. And then, for one terrible moment, he was seen to hesitate and stagger, overtaken, perhaps, by the giddiness of exhaustion. A great cry went up from the crowd as he was seen to fall into the sea.
It was a perilous fall. The frigate Algeciras was moored close to the Orion and he had fallen into the gap between them. There was a danger that he might be trapped beneath one of the two hulls. Four men at once put out in a boat to rescue him, while the crowd cheered. But he did not come to the surface. He had vanished into the sea making scarcely a ripple, as though he had plunged into a vat of oil. The boat’s crew sounded and dived in vain. The search continued until nightfall, but they did not even find his body.
Next day the local news-sheet contained the following item:
17 November 1823. Yesterday a convict working aboard the Orion fell into the sea and was drowned after rescuing a member of the crew. The body has not been recovered. It is assumed that it was caught in the piles under the Arsenal jetty. The man’s prison registration-number was 9430 and his name was Jean Valjean.