1
NUMBER 24601 BECOMES NUMBER 9430
JEAN VALJEAN has been recaptured.
We shall be pardoned for passing rapidly over the painful details. We shall merely reproduce a couple of items published in the newspapers of that day, some few months after the remarkable events that occurred at M——sur M——.
The first item, in the Royalist organ Le Drapeau blanc of July 25, 1823, tersely reports Valjean’s arrest. It acknowledges that he had made a fortune legitimately in the glassworks business, and that the money cannot be found (implying that the law would have cheerfully appropriated it otherwise).
The second article, which enters a little more into detail, is taken from the Journal de Paris of the same date:
“A former convict, named Jean Valjean, has recently been brought before the Var Assizes, under circumstances calculated to attract attention. This villain had succeeded in eluding the vigilance of the police; he had changed his name, and had even been adroit enough to procure the appointment of mayor in one of our small towns in the North. He had established in this town a very considerable business, but was, at length, unmasked and arrested, thanks to the indefatigable zeal of the public authorities. He kept, as his mistress, a prostitute, who died of the shock at the moment of his arrest. This wretch, who is endowed with herculean strength, managed to escape, but, three or four days afterwards, the police recaptured him, in Paris, just as he was getting into one of the small vehicles that ply between the capital and the village of Montfermeil (Seine-et-Oise). It is said that he had availed himself of the interval of these three or four days of freedom, to withdraw a considerable sum deposited by him with one of our principal bankers. The amount is estimated at six or seven hundred thousand francs. According to the minutes of the case, he has concealed it in some place known to himself alone, and it has been impossible to seize it; however that may be, the said Jean Valjean has been brought before the assizes of the Department of the Var under indictment for an assault and armed robbery on the high road committed some eight years ago on the person of one of those honest lads who, as the patriarch of Ferney has written in immortal verse,
... De Savoie arrivent tous les ans,
Et dont la main légèrement essuie
Ces longs canaux engorgés par la suie.
baThis bandit attempted no defence. It was proven by the able and eloquent representative of the crown that the robbery was shared in by others, and that Jean Valjean formed one of a band of robbers in the South. Consequently, Jean Valjean, being found guilty, was condemned to death. The criminal refused to appeal to the higher courts, and the king, in his inexhaustible clemency, deigned to commute his sentence to that of hard labour in prison for life. Jean Valjean was immediately forwarded to the galleys at Toulon.”
It will not be forgotten that Jean Valjean had at M——sur M——certain religious habits. Some of the newspapers and, among them, the
Constitutionnel, held up this commutation as a triumph of the clerical party.
1Jean Valjean changed his number at the galleys. He became 9430.
After Jean valjean’s arrest, the town of which he had been mayor rapidly declines, as greedy minor capitalists squabble over the remains of his business. Poverty and misery ensue.
A second chapter tells of the local superstition that the Devil buries treasure in the woods near Montfermeil, where Fantine had left Cosette with the Thénardiers. Glimpsing Jean Valjean there, the drunken road worker Boulatruelle thinks he must have buried treasure there—as he in fact had done—and feverishly searches for it.