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PETIT GERVAIS
JEAN VALJEAN went out of the city as if he were escaping. He made all haste to get into the open country, taking the first lanes and bypaths that offered, without noticing that he was every moment retracing his steps. He wandered thus all the morning. He had eaten nothing, but he felt no hunger. He was the prey of a multitude of new sensations. He felt somewhat angry, he knew not against whom. He could not have told whether he were touched or humiliated. There came over him, at times, a strange relenting which he struggled with, and to which he opposed the hardening of his past twenty years. This condition wearied him. He saw, with disquietude, shaken within him that species of frightful calm which the injustice of his fate had given him. He asked himself what should replace it. At times he would really have liked better to be in prison with the gendarmes, and that things had not happened thus; that would have given him less agitation. Although the season was well advanced, there were yet here and there a few late flowers in the hedges, the odour of which, as it met him in his walk, recalled the memories of his childhood. These memories were almost unbearable, it was so long since they had occurred to him.
Inexpressible thoughts thus gathered in his mind the whole day.
As the sun was sinking towards the horizon, lengthening the shadow on the ground of the smallest pebble, Jean Valjean was seated behind a thicket in a large reddish plain, absolutely deserted. There was no horizon but the Alps. Not even the steeple of a village church. Jean Valjean might have been seven miles from D—. A by-path which crossed the plain passed a few steps from the thicket.
In the midst of this meditation, which would have heightened not a little the frightful effect of his rags to any one who might have met him, he heard a joyous sound.
He turned his head, and saw coming along the path a little Savoyard,
r a dozen years old, singing, with his hurdygurdy at his side, and his cherrywood box on his back.
One of those pleasant and gay youngsters who go from place to place, with their knees sticking through their trousers.
Always singing, the boy stopped from time to time, and played at tossing up some pieces of money that he had in his hand, probably his whole fortune. Among them there was one forty-sous coin.
The boy stopped by the side of the thicket without seeing Jean Valjean, and tossed up his handful of sous; until this time he had skilfully caught the whole of them upon the back of his hand.
This time the forty-sous coin got away from him, and rolled towards the thicket, near Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean put his foot upon it.
The boy, however, had followed the coin with his eye, and had seen where it went.
He was not frightened, and walked straight to the man.
It was an entirely solitary place. Far as the eye could reach there was no one on the plain or in the path. Nothing could be heard, but the faint cries of a flock of birds of passage, that were flying across the sky at an immense height. The child turned his back to the sun, which made his hair like threads of gold, and flushed the savage face of Jean Valjean with a lurid glow.
“Monsieur,” said the little Savoyard, with that childish confidence which is made up of ignorance and innocence, “my coin?”
“What is your name?” said Jean Valjean.
“Petit Gervais, monsieur.”
“Go away,” said Jean Valjean.
“Monsieur,” continued the boy, “give me my coin.”
Jean Valjean dropped his head and did not answer.
The child repeated:
“My coin, monsieur!”
Jean Valjean’s eye remained fixed on the ground.
“My coin!” exclaimed the boy, “my white coin! my silver!”
Jean Valjean did not appear to understand. The boy took him by the collar of his smock and shook him. And at the same time he made an effort to move the big, iron-soled shoe which was placed upon his treasure.
“I want my coin! my forty-sous coin!”
The child began to cry. Jean Valjean raised his head. He still kept his seat. His look was troubled. He looked upon the boy with an air of wonder, then reached out his hand towards his stick, and exclaimed in a terrible voice: “Who is there?”
“Me, monsieur,” answered the boy. “Petit Gervais! me! me! give me back my forty sous, if you please! Take away your foot, monsieur, if you please!” Then becoming angry, small as he was, and almost threatening:
“Come, now, will you take away your foot? Why don’t you take away your foot?”
“Ah! you here yet!” said Jean Valjean, and rising hastily to his feet, without releasing the coin, he added: “You’d better run!”
The boy looked at him in terror, then began to tremble from head to foot, and after a few seconds of stupor, took to flight and ran with all his might without daring to turn his head or to utter a cry.
At a little distance, however, he stopped for want of breath, and Jean Valjean in his reverie heard him sobbing.
In a few minutes the boy was gone.
The sun had gone down.
The shadows were deepening around Jean Valjean. He had not eaten during the day; probably he had some fever.
He had remained standing, and had not changed his position since the child fled. His breathing came at long and unequal intervals. His eyes were fixed on a spot ten or twelve steps before him, and seemed to be studying with profound attention the form of an old piece of blue crockery that was lying in the grass. All at once he shivered; he began to feel the cold night air.
He pulled his cap down over his forehead, sought mechanically to fold and button his smock around him, stepped forward and stooped to pick up his stick.
At that instant he perceived the forty-sous coin which his foot had half buried in the ground, and which glistened among the pebbles. It was like an electric shock. “What is that?” said he, between his teeth. He drew back a step or two, then stopped without the power to withdraw his gaze from this point which his foot had covered the instant before, as if the thing that glistened there in the obscurity had been an open eye fixed upon him.
After a few minutes, he sprang convulsively towards the coin, seized it, and, rising, looked away over the plain, straining his eyes towards all points of the horizon, standing and trembling like a wild beast which is seeking a place of refuge.
He saw nothing. Night was falling, the plain was cold and bare, thick purple mists were rising in the glimmering twilight.
He said: “Oh!” and began to walk rapidly in the direction in which the child had gone. After some thirty steps, he stopped, looked about, and saw nothing.
Then he called with all his might “Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais!”
And then he listened.
There was no answer.
The countryside was desolate and gloomy. On all sides was space. There was nothing about him but a shadow in which his gaze was lost, and a silence in which his voice was lost.
A biting norther was blowing, which gave a kind of dismal life to everything about him. The bushes shook their little thin arms with an incredible fury. One would have said that they were threatening and pursuing somebody.
sHe began to walk again, then quickened his pace to a run, and from time to time stopped and called out in that solitude, in a most desolate and terrible voice:
“Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais!”
Surely, if the child had heard him, he would have been frightened, and would have hid himself. But doubtless the boy was already far away.
He met a priest on horseback. He went up to him and said:
“Monsieur cure, have you seen a child go by?”
“No,” said the priest.
“Petit Gervais was his name?”
“I have seen nobody.”
He took two five-franc coins from his bag, and gave them to the priest.
“Monsieur cure, this is for your poor. Monsieur cure, he is a little fellow, about ten years old, with a cherrywood box, I think, and a hurdygurdy. He went this way. One of these Savoyards, you know?”
“I have not seen him.”
“Petit Gervais? is his village near here? can you tell me?”
“If it be as you say, my friend, the little fellow is a foreigner. They roam about this country. Nobody knows them.”
Jean Valjean hastily took out two more five-franc coins, and gave them to the priest.
“For your poor,” said he.
Then he added wildly:
“Monsieur abbé, have me arrested. I am a robber.”
The priest put spurs to his horse, and fled in great fear.
Jean Valjean began to run again in the direction which he had first taken.
He went on in this wise for a considerable distance, looking around, calling and shouting, but met nobody else. Two or three times he left the path to look at what seemed to be somebody lying down or crouching; it was only low bushes or rocks. Finally, at a place where three paths met, he stopped. The moon had risen. He strained his eyes in the distance, and called out once more “Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais!” His cries died away into the mist, without even awakening an echo. Again he murmured: “Petit Gervais!” but with a feeble, and almost inarticulate voice. That was his last effort; his knees suddenly bent under him, as if an invisible power overwhelmed him at a blow, with the weight of his bad conscience; he fell exhausted upon a great stone, his hands clenched in his hair, and his face on his knees, and exclaimed: “What a wretch I am!”
Then his heart swelled, and he burst into tears. It was the first time he had wept for nineteen years.
When Jean Valjean left the bishop’s house, as we have seen, his mood was one that he had never known before. He could understand nothing of what was going on within him. He set himself stubbornly in opposition to the angelic deeds and the gentle words of the old man, “you have promised me to become an honest man. I am purchasing your soul, I withdraw it from the spirit of perversity and I give it to God Almighty.” This came back to him incessantly. To this celestial tenderness, he opposed pride, which is the fortress of evil in man. He felt dimly that the pardon of this priest was the hardest assault, and the most formidable attack which he had yet sustained; that his hardness of heart would be complete, if it resisted this kindness; that if he yielded, he must renounce that hatred with which the acts of other men had for so many years filled his soul, and in which he found satisfaction; that, this time, he must conquer or be conquered, and that the struggle, a gigantic and decisive struggle, had begun between his own wickedness, and the goodness of this man.
Confronted with all these revelations, he staggered like a drunken man. While thus walking on with haggard look, had he a distinct perception of what the result of his adventure at D—might mean? Did he hear those mysterious murmurs which warn or entreat the spirit at certain moments of life? Did a voice whisper in his ear that he had just passed through the decisive hour of his destiny, that there was no longer a middle course for him, that if, thereafter, he should not be the best of men, he would be the worst, that he must now, so to speak, mount higher than the bishop, or fall lower than the galley slave; that, if he would become good, he must become an angel; that, if he would remain wicked, he must become a monster?
One thing was certain, nor did he himself doubt it, that he was no longer the same man, that all was changed in him, that it was no longer in his power to prevent the bishop from having talked to him and having moved him.
In this frame of mind, he had met Petit Gervais, and stolen his forty sous. Why? He could not have explained it, surely; was it the final effect, the final effort of the evil thoughts he had brought from the galleys, a remnant of impulse, a result of what is called in physics momentum? It was that, and it was also perhaps even less than that. We will say plainly, it was not he who had stolen, it was not the man, it was the beast which, from habit and instinct, had stupidly set its foot upon that money, while the intellect was struggling in the midst of so many new and unknown influences. When the intellect awoke and saw this act of the brute, Jean Valjean recoiled in anguish and uttered a cry of horror.
It was a strange phenomenon, possible only in the condition in which he then was, but the fact is, that in stealing this money from that child, he had done a thing of which he was no longer capable.
However that may be, this last misdeed had a decisive effect upon him; it rushed across the chaos of his intellect and dissipated it, set the light on one side and the dark clouds on the other, and acted upon his soul, in the condition it was in, as certain chemical reagents act upon a turbid mixture, by precipitating one element and producing a clear solution of the other.
At first, even before self-examination and reflection, distractedly, like one who seeks to escape, he endeavoured to find the boy to give him back his money; then, when he found that that was useless and impossible, he stopped in despair. At the very moment when he exclaimed: “What a wretch I am!” he saw himself as he was, and was already so far separated from himself that it seemed to him that he was only a phantom, and that he had there before him, in flesh and bone with his stick in his hand, his smock on his back, his knapsack filled with stolen articles on his shoulders, with his stern and gloomy face, and his thoughts full of abominable projects, the hideous galley slave, Jean Valjean.
Excess of misfortune, we have remarked, had made him, in some sort, a visionary. This then was like a vision. He veritably saw this Jean Valjean, this ominous face, before him. He was on the point of asking himself who that man was, and he was horror-stricken by it.
His brain was in one of those violent, and yet frightfully calm, conditions where reverie is so profound that it swallows up reality. We no longer see the objects that are before us, but we see, as if outside of ourselves, the forms that we have in our minds.
He beheld himself then, so to speak, face to face, and at the same time, through that hallucination, he saw, at a mysterious distance, a sort of light which he took at first to be a torch. Examining more attentively this light which dawned upon his conscience, he recognised that it had a human form, and that this torch was the bishop.
His conscience weighed in turn these two men thus placed before it, the bishop and Jean Valjean. Anything less than the first would have failed to soften the second. By one of those singular effects which are peculiar to this kind of ecstasy, as his reverie continued, the bishop grew grander and more resplendent in his eyes, Jean Valjean shrank and faded away. At one moment he was but a shadow. Suddenly he disappeared. The bishop alone remained.
He filled the whole soul of this wretched man with a magnificent radiance.
Jean Valjean wept long. He shed hot tears, he wept bitterly, with more weakness than a woman, with more terror than a child.
While he wept, the light grew brighter and brighter in his mind—an extraordinary light, a light at once ravishing and terrible. His past life, his first offence, his long expiation, his brutal exterior, his hardened interior, his release made glad by so many schemes of vengeance, what had happened to him at the bishop‘s, his last action, this theft of forty sous from a child, a crime meaner and the more monstrous that it came after the bishop’s pardon, all this returned and appeared to him, clearly, but in a light that he had never seen before. He beheld his life, and it seemed to him horrible; his soul, and it seemed to him frightful. There was, however, a softened light upon that life and upon that soul. It seemed to him that he was looking upon Satan by the light of Paradise.
tHow long did he weep thus? What did he do after weeping? Where did he go? Nobody ever knew. It is known simply that, on that very night, the stage-driver who drove at that time on the Grenoble route, and arrived at D—about three o‘clock in the morning, saw, as he passed through the bishop’s street, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneeling upon the pavement in the shadow, before the door of Monseigneur Bienvenu.