THE NIGHT of 16 February was a blessed one, with a clear sky shading into darkness. It was the night of Marius and Cosette’s wedding day.
The day itself had been delightful, not perhaps Monsieur Gillenormand’s vision of cherubs and cupids fluttering above the heads of the bridal pair, but gentle and gay.
Wedding customs in 1833 were not what they are today. France had not yet borrowed from England the supreme refinement of abducting the bride, carrying her off from the church as though ashamed of her happiness like an escaping bankrupt or like rape in the manner of the Song of Songs. The chastity and propriety of whisking one’s paradise into a post-chaise to consummate it in a tavern-bed at so much a night, mingling the most sacred of life’s memories with a hired driver and tavern serving maids, was not yet understood in France.
In this second half of the nineteenth century in which we live the mayor in his robes and the priest in his chasuble are not enough. We must have the Longjumeau postilion in his blue waistcoat with brass buttons, his green leather breeches, waxed hat, whip and top boots. France has not yet carried elegance, like the English nobility, to the point of showering the bridal pair with worn-out slippers, in memory of Marlborough, who was assailed by an angry aunt at his wedding by way of wishing him luck. These are not yet a part of our wedding celebrations – but patience, they will doubtless come.
There was a strange belief in those days that a wedding was a quiet family affair, that a patriarchal banquet in no way marred its solemnity, that even an excess of gaiety, provided it was honest, did no harm to happiness, and finally that it was right and proper that the linking of two lives from which a family was to ensue should take place in the domestic nuptial chamber. In short, people were so shameless as to get married at home.
So the wedding reception took place, in this now outmoded fashion, at the house of Monsieur Gillenormand. But there are formalities in these matters, banns to be read and so forth, and they could not be ready before the 16th. This, as it happened, was Mardi gras, to the perturbation of Aunt Gillenormand.
‘Mardi gras!’ exclaimed the old man. ‘Well, why not? There’s a proverb which says that no graceless child is ever born of a Mardi gras marriage. Do you want to put it off, Marius?’
‘Certainly not,’ said the young man.
‘Very well then, the sixteenth it is.’
And so it was, regardless of public festivity. The day was a rainy one, as it happened, but there is always a patch of blue sky visible to lovers, although the rest of the world may see nothing but their umbrellas.
On the previous day Jean Valjean, in the presence of Monsieur Gillenormand, had handed Marius the 584,000 francs. The marriage deeds were very simple.
Since Valjean no longer needed Toussaint he had passed her on to Cosette, who had promoted her to the rank of lady’s maid. As for Valjean himself, a handsome room in Monsieur Gillenormand’s house had been expressly furnished for him, and Cosette had said so bewitchingly, ‘Father, I beseech you!’, that he had almost promised to live in it. But a few days before the wedding he had an accident, injuring his right thumb. It was a trifling matter, but it obliged him to wrap up his hand and keep his arm in a sling, which meant that he could not sign any documents. Monsieur Gillenormand, as deputy-guardian, had done so in his place.
We shall not take the reader to the mairie or the church ceremony, but will confine ourselves to recounting an incident, unperceived by the wedding party, which occurred on the way from the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire to the church of Saint Paul.
At that time the northern end of the Rue Saint-Louis was being re-paved and there was a barrier across the Rue du Parc-Royal. This made it impossible for the wedding party to go the shortest way to the church; they had to go round by the boulevard. One of the wedding guests remarked that, being Mardi gras, there would be a great deal of traffic … ‘Why?’ asked Monsieur Gillenormand… ‘Because of the masks’ … ‘Splendid,’ said the old man. ‘We’ll go that way. These young folk are entering upon the serious business of life. It will do them good to start with a masquerade.’
So they went by way of the boulevard. The first carriage contained Cosette and Aunt Gillenormand, Monsieur Gillenormand and Jean Valjean; Marius, still kept separate from his bride as custom required, came in the second. Upon leaving the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire they found themselves in a procession of vehicles stretching from the Madeleine to the Bastille and back. There were masks in abundance. Although it rained occasionally, Paillasse, Pantalon, and Gilles were not to be put off. Paris, in the happy humour of that winter of 1833, had put on the guise of Venice. We do not see a Mardi gras like that any more. Since everything is now an overblown carnival, carnivals no longer exist.
The side-streets, like the house windows, were thronged with spectators. Besides the masks there was the Mardi gras procession of vehicles, fiacres, hackney cabs, gigs, cabriolets, and others, kept so strictly in order by the police that they might have been running on rails. A person in one of those vehicles was both spectator and participant. The endless, parallel files of conveyances, going in opposite directions towards the Chaussée d’Antin and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, were like rivers flowing up – and down-stream. Important vehicles bearing the quarterings of peers of France, or belonging to ambassadors, were allowed free passage in the middle of the road. England, too, cracked her whip in that scene of Parisian gaiety. My Lord Seymour, who had been endowed with a vulgar nickname, made a great show in his post-chaise. And also in the double file, escorted by gendarmes as conscientious as sheepdogs, were family barouches with grandmothers and aunts and charming clusters of children in fancy dress, six- and seven-year-old pierrots and pierrettes, very conscious of the dignity of taking part in this public ceremony.
Now and then there was a hold-up in one or other of the lines of vehicles, and they had to stop until the blockage was cleared. Then they went on again. The wedding party, heading in the direction of the Bastille, was on the right-hand side of the road. It was brought to a stop at the entrance to the Rue du Pont-aux-Choux, and the line going in the opposite direction stopped at almost the same moment. There was a carriage of masks in that line.
These carriages or, better, these cart-loads of masks are well known to the Parisians – so much so that if a Mardi gras or micarême were to go by without them people would say, ‘There must be some reason. Probably the government’s going to fall.’ They are filled with clusters of Cassandras, Harlequins, and Columbines, figures of fantasy and mythology of every conceivable kind, and their tradition goes back to the early days of the monarchy. The household accounts of Louis XI include an item of ‘twenty sous for three carts of masqueraders’. In these days they travel noisily in hired vans, inside and on top, twenty where there is room for six, girls seated on the men’s knees, all laughing and screaming – hillocks of raucous merriment amid the crowds. But it is a gaiety too cynical to be honest. It exists simply to prove to the Parisians that this is a day of carnival.
There is a moral in those blowzy conveyances, a sort of protocol. One senses a mysterious affinity between public men and public women. How many infamous plots have been hatched beneath the semblance of gaiety, how often has prostitution served the purposes of espionage? It is sad that the crowds should be amused by what should outrage them, these manifestations of riotous vulgarity; but what is to be done? The insult to the public is exonerated by the public’s laughter. The laughter of everyman is the accomplice of universal degradation. The populace, like all tyrants, must have its buffoons. Paris is the great, mad town whenever she is not the sublime city, and carnival is a part of politics. Paris, let us admit it, is very ready to be amused by what is ignoble. All she asks of her masters is – make squalor pleasant to look at. Rome was the same. She loved Nero, that monstrous exhibitionist.
As it happened, one of these bevies of masked men and women, in a big wagon, stopped on the left-hand side of the street at the moment when the wedding party stopped on the right.
‘Hallo,’ said one of the masks. ‘A wedding.’
‘A sham one,’ said another. ‘We’re the real celebration.’
Too far off to converse with the wedding party, and in any case afraid of getting into trouble with the police, the two masks looked elsewhere. A moment later they and their companions had plenty to occupy them. The crowd began to howl and shower insults on them, and not all the extensive vocabulary they had picked up in the market-place could drown that lusty voice. There was a lurid exchange of abuse. Meanwhile two other members of the same company, one a Spaniard with an exaggerated nose and enormous black moustache, and the other a skinny young girl in a wolf-mask, had noticed the wedding party and were talking together amid the hubbub. It was a cold day, and the open cart was soaked with rain. The girl in her low-necked dress coughed and shivered as she spoke. Their dialogue was as follows, the man speaking first:
‘Hey!’
‘Well?’
‘See that old man?’
‘Which?’
‘The one in the first wedding coach, on our side.’
‘The one with his arm in a sling?’
‘That’s him.’
‘Well?’
‘I’m sure I know him.’
‘You do?’
‘I’ll take my oath on it. Can you see the bride if you stretch?’
‘No.’
‘Or the groom?’
‘There isn’t one, not in that carriage, unless it’s the old man.’
‘Try to see the bride. Crane your neck a bit more.’
‘I still can’t.’
‘Well, never mind. There’s something about that chap – I’ll swear I’ve seen him somewhere.’
‘And so what?’
‘I dunno. Sometimes it comes in handy.’
‘A fat lot I care.’
‘I’ll swear I know him.’
‘Anything you say.’
‘What the devil’s he doing at a wedding?’
‘Search me.’
‘And where do that lot come from?’
‘How do I know?’
‘Well, look – there’s something you can do.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Get off the cart and follow them.’
‘What for?’
‘To find out who they are and where they’re going. Hurry up, my girl. You’re young.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m watched. I owe my day off to the cops. If I get off the cart they’ll pick me up next instant. You know they will.’
‘That’s true. It’s a nuisance. I’m interested in that fellow.’
‘Anyone ’ud think you were a girl.’
‘He’s in the first carriage, the bride’s carriage.’
‘So?’
‘That means he’s the father.’
‘There’s other fathers.’
‘Now listen – I can scarcely go anywhere unless I’m masked. That’s all right for today, but there won’t be any masks tomorrow. I’ll have to keep under cover or I’m liable to be picked up. But you’re free.’
‘Not all that much.’
‘More than I am, anyway. So you’ve got to try and find out where that wedding party was going, and who the people are and where they live.’
‘Sounds easy, doesn’t it? A wedding party going somewhere or other on Mardi gras. Like looking for a needle in a haystack!’
‘All the same, you’ve got to try, Azelma, do you hear?’
Then the two lines resumed their progress in opposite directions, and the wagon of masks lost sight of the wedding party.
To how many of us is it given to realize our dream? Perhaps the matter is decided by elections in Heaven, with the angels voting and all of us candidates. Cosette and Marius had been elected. Cosette at the church and the mairie was glowingly and dazzingly pretty. She had been dressed by Toussaint, with the help of Nicolette, in a dress of Binche lace with a white taffeta under-skirt, a veil of English stitching, a necklace of small pearls, and a crown of orange blossom, and she was dazzling in this whiteness, she might have been a virgin in process of being transformed into a goddess.
Marius’s beautiful hair was lustrous and scented, but here and there beneath its thick locks the scars left by the wounds he had received on the barricade were still to be discerned.
Monsieur Gillenormand, proudly erect, his costume and his manners more than ever depicting the elegance of the days of Barras, escorted Cosette, replacing Jean Valjean, who could not give her his arm since he still wore it in a sling. Clad in black, he followed them smiling.
‘Monsieur Fauchelevent,’ the old man said to him, ‘this is a great day. I decree happiness, the end of all grief and affliction. Nothing bad may be allowed to show itself. That in fact there are unhappy people is a disgrace to the blue of the sky. Evil does not come to the man who is good at heart. All human miseries have their capital and seat of government in Hell itself – in other words, those infernal Tuileries. But I’m not going to make a speech. I no longer have political opinions. All I want is for everyone to be rich and happy.’
When at length all the ceremonies were completed, at the mairie and at the church, when all the documents were signed, rings exchanged, and, hand-in-hand, he in black and she in white, the wedded couple emerged through the church doors between rows of admiring spectators to return to the carriage, Cosette could scarcely believe that it was all true. She looked at Marius, at the people, and at the sky, half afraid of waking out of a dream, and this look of doubtful amazement lent her an added charm. They returned home with Marius and Cosette seated side by side, while Monsieur Gillenormand and Jean Valjean sat facing them, Aunt Gillenormand being relegated to the second carriage. ‘My children,’ said the old gentleman, ‘you are now a baron and baroness with thirty thousand francs a year.’ And Cosette, leaning towards Marius, whispered angelically: ‘It’s true. My name is now the same as yours. I’m Madame You.’
Both were radiant in that supreme and unrepeatable moment, the union of youth and happiness. Between them they were less than forty years of age. It was the sublimation of marriage, and the two young creatures were like lilies. Cosette saw Marius in a haze of glory, and Marius saw Cosette as though on an altar; and somehow, behind these two visions, a mist for Cosette, a flame for Marius, there was the ideal and the real, the place of kisses and dreams, the marriage-bed.
All the tribulations they had gone through, the griefs, despairs and sleepless nights, all these added to the enchantment of the hour that was approaching, past sorrow was an embellishment of rapture, unhappiness an added glow to present delight They were two hearts caught in the same spell, tinged with carnality in the case of Marius, of modest apprehension in the case of Cosette. ‘We shall see our garden in the Rue Plumet again,’ she whispered, while the fold of her dress flowed over his knee.
They returned to their house in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, and triumphantly mounted the stairs up which Marius’s unconscious form has been carried, months before. The poor, gathered at the doorway, received alms and blessed them. There were flowers everywhere, as many as there had been in the church; after the incense came the roses. They seemed to hear voices singing and felt Heaven in their hearts. And suddenly the clock struck. Marius gazed at Cosette’s sweet bare arms and at the pink objects vaguely to be discerned beneath the lace of her corsage, and Cosette, seeing his eyes upon her, blushed a deep red.
Many old friends of the Gillenormand family had been invited, and they made much of Cosette, addressing her as Madame la Baronne. Théodule Gillenormand, now promoted captain, had come from Chartres, where he was stationed, to attend his cousin Pontmercy’s wedding. Cosette did not recognize him; nor did he, the man of many light loves, recognize her. ‘How right I was to take no notice of that tale of a cavalry officer,’ old Monsieur Gillenormand murmured to himself. He pointed the joy of the occasion with a flow of maxims and aphorisms, in which Cosette supported him, spreading love and kindness as though it were a perfume around her. She talked with a particular tenderness to Jean Valjean, using inflections that recalled the innocent chatter of her childhood.
A banquet had been spread in the dining-room. Bright light is essential to great occasions. Dimness is unthinkable. It may be night outside, but there must be no shadows within. The dining-room was a scene of utmost gaiety. Hanging over the centre of the richly adorned table was a great Venetian chandelier with little birds of every colour perched among its candles. There were triple mirrors on the walls, and glass and crystal, porcelain, gold and silver shone and glittered. Gaps between the candelabra were filled with bouquets, so that wherever there was a candle there was a flower. In the ante-chamber three violins and a flute were softly playing Haydn quartets.
Jean Valjean was seated in a corner of the room by the open door, which almost hid him from sight. Just before they took their places at the table Cosette came over to him, and making a slow curtsey asked with a half-teasing tenderness:
‘Dear Father, are you happy?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m happy.’
‘Then why aren’t you smiling?’
Valjean obediently smiled, and a moment later Basque announced that dinner was served.
The company proceeded into the dining-room led by Monsieur Gillenormand with Cosette on his arm and seated themselves in their pre-arranged places. There were armchairs on either side of the bride, one for the old gentleman and the other for Jean Valjean. But when they looked round for ‘Monsieur Fauchelevent’ they found that he was not there. Monsieur Gillenormand asked Basque if he knew what had become of him.
‘Monsieur Fauchelevent requested me to say, monsieur, that his hand was paining him,’ said Basque. ‘He has therefore asked to be excused. He has gone out, but will be back tomorrow morning.’
This cast something of a chill upon the gathering, but fortunately Monsieur Gillenormand had high spirits enough for two. He said that Monsieur Fauchelevent had been quite right to go to bed early if he was in pain, slight though the injury was. This put everyone at their ease. Besides, what difference could a small patch of shadow make in such a wealth of light? Cosette and Marius were in one of those moments of bliss when they could be aware of nothing but happiness. And Monsieur Gillenormand had an idea.
‘Since Monsieur Fauchelevent will not be with us,’ he said, ‘Marius shall occupy his chair. It should by rights go to his aunt, but I know she will not begrudge it him. Come and sit beside Cosette, Marius.’
Marius did as he was bidden, to the general applause; and so it fell out that Cosette, who had been momentarily distressed by Jean Valjean’s absence, was made happy. She would not have regretted the absence of God himself, had Marius been there to take his place; and she laid her small, satin-clad foot upon his.
With the dessert Monsieur rose to his feet holding a glass of champagne (half-filled to allow for the shakiness of his ninety-two-year-old hand) and proposed the health of the young couple.
‘You are obliged to listen to two sermons,’ he said. ‘The curé this morning and this evening the old grandfather. I will give you a piece of advice – adore one another. Be happy. There are no wiser creatures in all creation than the turtle-doves. The philosophers say, “Be moderate in your pleasures,” but I say, enjoy them to the full. Go mad with pleasure and let the philosophers stuff their dull counsels down their throats. Can there be too much perfume in the world, too many rosebuds or green leaves or singing nightingales or breathless dawns? Can two people charm and delight one another too much, be too happy, too much alive? Moderate your pleasures – what nonsense it is! Down with the philosophers! Rapture is the true wisdom. Are we happy because we are good, or good because we are happy? I don’t know. Life is made up of such riddles. What matters is to be happy without pretence; to be a blind worshipper of the sun. For what is the sun if not love, and what is love if not a woman! It is woman who is all-powerful. Is not Marius, that young demagogue, enslaved by the tyranny of that little Cosette? And gladly so! Woman! You may talk of Robespierre, but it is the woman who rules. That is the only kind of royalty I recognize. What was Adam except Eve’s kingdom? What revolution did she need? Think of all the sceptres there have been – the royal sceptre surmounted by a fleur-de-lis, the imperial sceptre surmounted by a globe, Charlemagne’s sceptre which was of iron, and that of Louis le Grand which was gold – and the Revolution took them between thumb and forefingers and squashed them flat! So much for sceptres; but show me a revolution against a little scented handkerchief – I should like to see that! What makes it so powerful when it is nothing but a scrap of material? Ah, well, we who belonged to the eighteenth century were just as foolish as you are. You needn’t think you have changed the world just because you have discovered a cure for cholera and invented a dance called the cachucha. We still have to love women and there’s no getting away from it. Love, women and kisses are a magic circle from which I defy you to escape, and for my part I wish I could get back into it. How many of you have seen the rising of the planet Venus, the great courtesan of the skies? A man can be in a fury, but when she appears he has to smile. We are all the same, we have our rages, but when a woman appears on the scene we’re on our knees. Six months ago Marius was fighting, and today he has got married. It is well done, and he and Cosette are both right. You must live boldly each for the other, cling and caress, frantic only because you cannot do more. To love and be loved, that is the miracle of youth. Don’t think I’m just inventing it. I too have had my dreams and sighs; I too have moonlight in my soul. Love is a child six thousand years old who should be wearing a long white beard. Compared with Cupid, Methuselah is the merest urchin. For sixty centuries men and women have settled their affairs by loving one another. The devil, who is cunning, elected to hate man; but man, more cunning still, chose to love woman, and in this way did more good than all the harm done by the devil. My children, love is an old invention but it is one that is always new. Make the most of it. You must be so close that when you are together you lack nothing, Cosette the sun for Marius and Marius the whole world for Cosette. Fine weather, for Cosette, must be her husband’s smiles, and for Marius the rain should be his wife’s tears. You have drawn the winning number in the lottery and you must treasure it. Each must be a religion to the other. We all have our own way of worshipping God, but the best of all, Heaven knows, is to love one’s wife. Every lover is orthodox. The oath sworn by Henri IV puts sanctity somewhere between riot and drunkenness. I’ve no use for that oath, which makes no mention of women. They tell me I’m old, but it’s wonderful how young I feel. I should like to hear the piping in the woods. Young folk who continue to be both beautiful and happy, these delight me. I would gladly marry again if anyone would have me. It is impossible to suppose that God made us for any other purpose than to enact all the fantasies and delights of love. That is what we believed when I was young, and how enchanting, how tender and gracious, the women were! I made my conquests! And so I say to you, love one another. If it weren’t for love-making I don’t know what use the spring would be, and for my part I would ask God to take away all the lovely things he has made for us – flowers and birds and pretty girls. My dear children, accept an old man’s blessing!’
It was a gay, delightful evening, the tone being set by their host, who was so nearly a hundred years old. There was a little dancing and a great deal of laughter and happy commotion. But suddenly a silence fell. The newly married pair had disappeared. Shortly after midnight Monsieur Gillenormand’s house became a temple.
And here we must pause. At the door of every bridal bedchamber an angel stands, smiling, with a finger to his lips.
There should be a radiance about houses such as this, the rapture they contain should somehow escape through their stones. Love is the sublime melting-pot in which man and woman are fused together, and this melting of two souls into one must stir the outer darkness. The lover is a priest, the ravished virgin a consenting, trembling sacrifice. If it were given to us to peer into a higher world, should we not see beneficent forms clustered over that glowing house; and would not the lovers, thinking themselves alone in their ecstasies, hear the flutter of wings? That small and secret bedchamber is wide open to Heaven. When two mouths, consecrated by love, draw close together in the act of creation it is impossible that this ineffable kiss does not cause a tremor among the stars.
This is the true felicity and there is no joy outside the ecstasy of love. The rest is tears. To love or to have loved is all-sufficing. We must not ask for more. No other pearl is to be found in the shadowed folds of life. To love is an accomplishment.
What had become of Jean Valjean?
After he had smiled at Cosette’s gentle request, he had risen unnoticed and gone into the room next door, the same room into which, ragged and caked with mud, he had eight months earlier carried Monsieur Gillenormand’s grandson. Its ancient woodwork was now decked with flowers, and the musicians were seated on the settee on which Marius had been laid. Basque was there, placing small bouquets on the dinner-plates. Valjean told him the reason for his departure and left.
The dining-room windows looked out on to the street, and Jean Valjean stood beneath them for a few moments listening to the sounds of the party behind him, the predominating voice of Monsieur Gillenormand, the violins, the laughter, the rattle of crockery and, distinguishable amid it all, the gentle happy voice of Cosette. Then he left the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire and returned to the Rue de l’Homme-Armé.
He went by way of the Rue Saint-Louis and the Blancs-Manteaux, which, though rather longer, was the route he was accustomed to follow when walking between the two houses, to avoid the crowds and muddiness of the Rue Vieille-du-Temple. It was the way he had always come with Cosette, so he could take no other.
He arrived home, lit his candle, and went upstairs. The apartment was empty. Toussaint was not there and the sound of his footsteps, was louder than usual. All the cupboards were empty and Cosette’s bed was unmade, the pillow, without its lacy pillowslip, lying on a pile of folded blankets. All the feminine knick-knacks that had been Cosette’s had been taken away, nothing remained in the room but its heavy furniture and bare walls. Toussaint’s bed was also stripped. The only one that could be slept in was his own. He wandered from one room to another, shutting the cupboard doors. Then he went back to his own bedroom and put his candle on the table. He had taken his arm out of its sling and was using it as though it caused him no discomfort.
He went towards his bed, and as he did so his eye rested – was it by chance or was it intentional? – on the little black box that Cosette had called his ‘inseparable’. When they had moved into the Rue de l’Homme-Armé he had placed it on a foot-stool beside his bed. He now got a key out of his pocket and opened it.
Slowly he took out the clothes in which Cosette had left Montfermeil, ten years before. First the little black dress, then the black scarf, then the stout child’s shoes which Cosette could still have worn, so small were her feet, then the thick fustian camisole, the woollen petticoat, and, still bearing the impress of a small leg, two stockings scarcely longer than his hand. Everything was black, and it was he who had brought them when he took her from Montfermeil, He laid the garments on the bed, recalling that occasion. It had been a very cold December, and she had been shivering in rags, her small feet red from the clogs she wore. Her mother in her grave must have been happy to know that her daughter was in mourning, and that she was decently and warmly clad. He thought of those Montfermeil woods, through which they had walked together, the leafless trees, the absence of birds, the sunless sky; but still it had been delightful. He spread the garments on the bed and stood looking at them. She had been so little, carrying that big doll and with her golden louis in her apron pocket. She had laughed as they walked hand-in-hand, and he had become all the world to her.
Then the ageing white head sank forward, the stoical heart gave way and his face was buried in Cosette’s garments. Anyone passing on the stairs at that moment would have heard the sound of dreadful sobbing.
The fearful struggle, of which we have recorded more than one phase, had begun again. Jacob’s battle with the angel lasted only one night; but how often had Jean Valjean been darkly joined in mortal conflict with his own conscience! A desperate struggle: his foot slipping at moments and, at others, the ground seeming to give way beneath his feet. How stubbornly his conscience had fought, against him! How often had inexorable truth borne down like a great weight on his breast. How often, in that implacable light, had he begged for mercy – the light that the bishop had lit for him. How often had his rebellious spirit groaned beneath the knowledge of his plain duty. Opposition to God himself: self-inflicted wounds of whose bleeding he alone was conscious. Until finally, shaken, he had risen from despair above himself to say, ‘Now it is settled. I may go in peace.’ A melancholy peace!
But this night Valjean knew that the struggle had reached its climax. An agonizing question presented itself. Predestination does not always offer a straight road to the predestined; there are many twists and turns, forks and crossroads. Valjean had come to the most perilous of these. He had reached the ultimate intersection between good and evil and he saw it clearly. As had happened before, at critical moments of his life, two roads lay open to him, one seductive and the other terrifying. Which was he to take?
The road that appalled him was the one indicated by that mysterious finger that we always see when we try to peer into the darkness. Once more he was faced by the choice between the terrible haven and the alluring trap.
Is it true, then, that though the soul may be cured, destiny may not? Incurable destiny – how terrible a thing!
The question was this: how was he, Jean Valjean, to ensure the continued happiness of Cosette and Marius? It was he who had brought about that happiness, he who had forged it, and he could contemplate it with something of the satisfaction of the armourer who has worked well. They had each other, Marius and Cosette, and they were wealthy into the bargain; and all this was his doing.
But what was he now to do with it, this happiness that he had brought about? Should he take advantage of it, treat it as though it belonged to him? Cosette was another man’s, but he still retained as much of her as he could ever possess. Could he not continue to be almost her father, respected as he had always been, able when he chose to enter her house? And could he, without saying a word, bring his past into that future, seat himself by that fireside as though it were his right? Could he greet them smiling with his tragic hands, and cross that innocent threshold casting behind him the infamous shadow of the law? Could he still keep silent?
One must have grown accustomed to the harsher face of destiny to be able to confront facts in all their hideous nakedness. Good and evil are behind the vigorous question-mark: ‘Well,’ demands the sphinx, ‘what are you going to do?’ Valjean, from long habit, looked it steadily in the eye. Pitilessly he considered the facts in all their aspects. Cosette, that exquisite creature, was his lifeline. Was he to cling to it or let it go? If he clung to it, then he was safe; he could go on living. But if he let it go … Then, the abyss.
Thus did he wrestle with himself, torn between conviction and desire. It was a relief to him that he had been able to weep. This may have calmed him, although the beginning had been fearful, a tempest fiercer than the one that had once driven him to Arras. But now he was brought to a stop. It is terrible, in the battle à outrance between self-will and duty, when we seek in vain for a way out, to find ourselves caught with our back to the wall. But there is no end to conscience, for this is God himself. It is a bottomless well into which one may fling the labour of a lifetime, liberty and country, peace of mind and happiness; but in the end one has to fling in one’s heart. In the shades of the ancient hells there are pits like that.
Is it not permissible in the end to refuse? Cannot an endless bond be too much for human strength? Who would blame Sisyphus or Jean Valjean if at the last they said, ‘That is enough.’ The movement of matter is delimited by the forces to which it is subjected; may there not be a similar limitation on the movement of the soul? If perpetual motion is impossible, must we then insist upon perpetual devotion? The first step is nothing; it is the last which is difficult. Compared with Cosette’s marriage and all that would ensue from it, what was the Champmathieu affair? What was the return to prison compared with entry into limbo? The first step downward may be obscured, but the second is pitch black. Why not this time look the other way?
Martyrdom is a sublimation, but a sublimation that corrodes. It is a torment that sanctifies. One may endure it at first, the pincers, the red-hot iron, but must not the tortured flesh give way in the end?
In the calm of exhaustion, Jean Valjean considered the two alternatives, the balance between light and dark. Was he to inflict his prison record on those two happy children, or accept the loss of his own soul? Was Cosette to be sacrificed, or himself?
His meditation lasted through the night. He remained until daylight in the same posture, seated and bent double on the bed, with fists clenched and arms out-flung like those of a man cut down from the cross. He was motionless as a corpse, while the thoughts flew and tumbled in his mind. Until suddenly he shuddered convulsively and pressed Cosette’s garments to his lips. Only then did one see that he was alive.
One. Who was that one, when there was no one else there?
The One who is present in the shadows.