‘This is wonderful! You’re putting me to sleep in a bed next to your own.’ He broke off to laugh, and there was a monstrous quality in his laughter. ‘Have you thought what you’re doing? How do you know I have never murdered anyone?’
The bishop replied quietly: ‘That is God’s affair.’
Then with his lips moving as though in prayer, or as though he were speaking to himself, he gravely raised his right hand, the first two fingers extended, and blessed the man, who did not bow his head in response; after which he turned and, without looking back, went to his own room.
When the alcove was occupied, a large curtain of serge was drawn across the oratory to hide the altar. The bishop knelt for a moment in front of this and said a short prayer.
A minute later he was in his garden, strolling and meditating, his mind and spirit absorbed in the contemplation of those mysteries which God reveals at night to eyes that remain open.
As for the man, he was so utterly exhausted that he could not even enjoy the luxury of clean white sheets. After blowing out the candle with his nostril, as convicts do, he stretched himself fully clad on the bed and sank instantly into a profound slumber.
Midnight was striking when the bishop returned to his room, and a few minutes later all the house was asleep.
VI
Jean Valjean
In the small hours Jean Valjean awoke.
Jean Valjean came from a very poor peasant family in Brie. As a child he had not learnt to read. When he was old enough he had gone to work as a tree-pruner at Faverolles. His mother’s name was Jeanne Mathieu and his father was Jean Valjean or Vlajean, the latter being probably a nickname, a contraction of ‘voilà Jean’.
The boy was thoughtful without being melancholy, which is a characteristic of warm-hearted natures. In general he tended to be immature and rather unimpressive, at least in his outward aspect. He had lost both his parents when he was still very young. His mother had died of milk-fever, and his father, who was also a pruner, had been killed by a fall from a tree. His only living relative was a widowed sister older than himself who had seven children, boys and girls. She had housed and fed him while her husband was still alive, but the husband had died when the oldest child was eight and the youngest only one. Jean Valjean, who was then just twenty-four, had stepped into the breach and supported the sister who had cared for him. It had happened quite naturally, as a matter of plain duty, but with a certain surliness on the part of Valjean. All his youth had been spent in hard and ill-paid labour. He was never known to have a sweetheart, having had no time to fall in love.
He came home tired after work and ate his supper in silence. His sister, Mother Jeanne, would often take the best bits out of his bowl, the scrap of meat or whatever it might be, to give to one of the children. Seated with his head bowed and the long hair hiding his eyes, he would take no notice of this but would go on eating as though nothing had happened. Near the cottage where they lived, across the lane, was a farmhouse. The Valjean children, always ravenous, would borrow a jug of milk in their mother’s name from the farmer’s wife and drink it behind a hedge, snatching the jug from each other so greedily that they spilt milk on their clothes. Had their mother known she would have whipped them. But Valjean always paid, in his offhand, surly fashion, and they went unpunished.
His work as a tree-pruner brought him twenty-four sous a day during the season and at other times he worked as a harvester, cattleman, or at any other form of casual labour. He did what he could, and his sister also worked, but the seven children were a great burden. They were a sad little group, engulfed in poverty and always on the verge of destitution. And then came a particularly hard winter. Jean was out of work and there was no food in the house. Literally no bread – and seven children!
One Sunday night when Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Place de l’Église in Faverolles, was getting ready for bed, he heard a sound of shattered glass from his barred shop-window. He reached the spot in time to see an arm thrust through a hole in the pane. The hand grasped a loaf and the thief made off at a run. Isabeau chased and caught him. He had thrown away the loaf, but his arm was bleeding. The thief was Jean Valjean.
This was in the year 1795. Valjean was tried in the local court for housebreaking and robbery. He possessed a shotgun which he used for other than legitimate purposes – he was something of a poacher – and this told against him. There is a legitimate prejudice against poachers who, like smugglers, are not far removed from brigandage. Nevertheless it may be remarked in passing that there is a wide gulf between men of this kind and the murderous criminals in the towns. The poacher works in the woods, and the smuggler in the mountains or on the sea. The towns make men ferocious because they make them corrupt. Mountains, sea, and forest make men reckless. They stir the wildness of men’s nature, but do not necessarily destroy what is human.
Jean Valjean was found guilty. The Penal Code was explicit. There are terrible occasions in our civilization, those when the Law decrees the wrecking of a human life. It is a fateful moment when society draws back its skirts and consigns a sentient being to irrevocable abandonment. Jean Valjean was sentenced to five years hard labour.
On 22 April 1796, the victory of Montenotte was proclaimed in Paris, a victory won by the general commanding the army in Italy, referred to as Buona-Parte in the message addressed by the Directory to the Five Hundred, dated 2 Florial, Year IV. On the same day a large chain-gang was assembled at Bicêtre, of which Jean Valjean was one. A former turnkey at the prison, now aged nearly ninety, perfectly recalls the unhappy wretch who was chained at the end of the fourth row in the north corner of the prison yard. He was seated with the rest on the ground and seemed to understand nothing about his situation except that it was hideous. No doubt there was also a vague notion in his ignorant and untutored peasant mind that it was excessive. While heavy hammer-blows riveted the iron collar round his neck, he wept so bitterly that he could not speak except to mumble from time to time, ‘I was a tree-pruner in Faverolles.’ Still sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it in stages as though he were laying it upon seven heads of unequal height, a gesture designed to indicate that what he had done had been for the sake of seven children.
He was taken to Toulon, where he arrived, still chained by the neck, after a journey of twenty-seven days in a cart. Here he was clad in the red smock and everything that had been his life was blotted out, even to his name. He was no longer Jean Valjean, but No. 24601. As to what became of his sister and children, who knew or cared? What becomes of the leaves of a tree, sawed down at the root?
It is an old story. Those unhappy beings, God’s creatures, left without support, guidance, or shelter, were scattered no one knows where. Each presumably went its own way, to become lost in that cold murk that envelops solitary destinies, the distressful shadows wherein disappear so many unfortunates in the sombre progress of mankind. They left the district. The church-tower of what had been their village, the hedgerows of what had been their countryside, forgot them; and after a few years’ imprisonment even Jean Valjean forgot them. What had been an open wound was covered by a scar. That is all. During all the time he was in Toulon he only once had news of his sister. It was, I think, towards the end of his fourth year. I do not know how the news reached him. Someone who had known them in Faverolles had seen her. She was living in Paris, in a poor street near Saint-Sulpice, with only one of her children, the youngest, a little boy. Where were the other six? Perhaps she herself did not know. She was working as a folder and stitcher for a printer in the Rue de Sabot. She had to be there at six in the morning, well before daybreak in winter. There was a school in the same house where she took her seven-year-old boy. But since she started work at six and the school did not open until seven the child had to wait for an hour in the open air of the courtyard – in winter an hour of darkness. He was not allowed into the printer’s shop because, they said, he got in the way. Passing workmen would see the poor little creature crouched half asleep on
the cobbles, or huddled sleeping over his basket. On rainy days an old woman, the concierge, would take pity on him and let him into her den, which contained nothing but a truckle-bed, a spinning wheel, and two wooden chairs; and here the little boy would curl up in a corner, hugging the cat for warmth. At seven o’clock he went into school. This was what Jean Valjean learned, and the story brought a momentary blaze of light as though a window had been suddenly opened on the lives of those beings he had loved. Then it was closed again. He heard no more of them; he was destined never to see them again; and there will be no further mention of them in this tale.
Jean Valjean’s turn to escape came towards the end of that fourth year. His fellow-prisoners helped him as was customary. He got away, and for two days drifted in freedom through the countryside: if to be tracked is freedom, to be constantly on the alert, to tremble at every sound, to be frightened of everything, a smoking chimney, a passing man, a barking dog, a galloping horse, a striking clock; to be frightened of the daylight because one can see, and of the darkness because one cannot; to be frightened of the road, the pathway, and the thicket; to be afraid to sleep. On the evening of the second day he was caught. He had neither eaten nor slept for thirty-six hours. The tribunal added three years to his sentence, making eight in all. His second turn came in the sixth year and again he used it, but with even less success. His absence was discovered at roll-call. The alarm-gun was fired, and that night the watch found him in the dockyard hiding under the keel of a vessel under construction. He fought against them, and for the crimes of attempted escape and resisting arrest the Code prescribed the penalty of an additional five years, two in double chains. Thirteen years. His third turn came in the tenth year, and again he tried and failed. For this he got another three years, making sixteen. It was in the thirteenth year, I believe, that he made his last attempt. He was out for only four hours, but they cost him another three years. Nineteen years altogether. He was released in October 1815, after being imprisoned in 1796 for having broken a window-pane and stolen a loaf of bread.
A brief parenthesis. This is the second time that the present writer, in his study of the penal system and the damning of men’s souls by law, has found the theft of a loaf of bread to be the starting-point of the wrecking of a life. Claude Gueux stole a loaf, as did Jean Valjean. English statistics have established that in London hunger is the direct cause of four robberies out of five.
Jean Valjean had gone to imprisonment weeping and trembling; he emerged impassive. He had gone despairing; he emerged grim-faced.
What had taken place in this man’s soul?
VII
The inwardness of despair
We must try to answer the question. It is very necessary that society should look at these matters, since they are the work of society.
He was an untutored man, as we have said; but that is not to say that he was stupid. There was a spark of natural intelligence in him; and adversity, which sheds its own light, had fostered the light slowly dawning in his mind. Under the lash and in chains, on fatigue and in the solitary cell, under the burning Mediterranean sun and on the prisoner’s plank bed, he withdrew into his own conscience and reflected.
Constituting himself judge and jury, he began by trying his own case.
He admitted that he was not an innocent man unjustly punished. He had committed an excessive and blameworthy act. The loaf of bread might not have been refused him if he had asked for it, and in any event it would have been better to wait, either for charity or for work. The argument, ‘Can a man wait when he is half-starved’ was not unanswerable, for the fact is that very few people literally die of hunger. Man is so constituted that he can endure long periods of suffering, both moral and physical, without dying of it. He should have had patience, and this would have been better even for the children. To attempt to take society by the throat, vulnerable creature that he was, and to suppose that he could escape from poverty through theft, had been an act of folly. In any case, the road leading to infamy was a bad road of escape. He admitted all this – in short, that he had done wrong.
But then he asked questions.
Was he the only one at fault in this fateful business? Was it not a serious matter that a man willing to work should have been without work and without food? And, admitting the offence, had not the punishment been ferocious and outrageous? Was not the law more at fault in the penalty it inflicted than he had been in the crime he committed? Had not the scales of justice been over-weighted on the side of expiation? And did not this weighting of the scales, far from effacing the crime, produce a quite different result, namely, a reversal of the situation, substituting for the original crime the crime of oppression, making the criminal a victim and the law his debtor, transferring justice to the side of him who had offended against it? Did not the penalty, aggravated by his attempts to escape, become in the end a sort of assault by the stronger on the weaker, a crime committed by society against the individual and repeated daily for nineteen years?
He asked himself whether human society had the right to impose upon its members, on the one hand its mindless improvidence and, on the other hand, its merciless providence; to grind a poor man between the millstones of need and excess – need of work and excess of punishment. Was it not monstrous that society should treat in this fashion precisely those least favoured in the distribution of wealth, which is a matter of chance, and therefore those most needing indulgence?
He asked these questions and, having answered them, passed judgement on society.
He condemned it to his hatred. He held it responsible for what he was undergoing and resolved that, if the chance occurred, he would not hesitate to call it to account. He concluded that there was no true balance between the wrong he had done and the wrong that was inflicted upon him, and that although his punishment might not be technically an injustice it was beyond question an iniquity.
Anger may be ill-considered and absurd; we may be mistakenly angered; but only when there is some deep-seated reason are we outraged. Jean Valjean was outraged.
Moreover society as a whole had done him nothing but injury. He had seen nothing of it but the sour face which it calls justice and shows only to those it castigates. Men had touched him only to hurt him; his only contact with them had been through blows. From the time of his childhood, and except for his mother and sister, he had never encountered a friendly word or a kindly look. During the years of suffering he reached the conclusion that life was a war in which he was one of the defeated. Hatred was his only weapon, and he resolved to sharpen it in prison and carry it with him when he left.
There was in Toulon a school conducted by monks which offered elementary instruction to those unfortunates who were willing to accept it. Valjean was among them. He went there when he was forty and learned to read, write, and calculate, with the feeling that to improve his mind was to fortify his hatred. There are circumstances in which education and enlightenment can become an extension of evil.
The sad fact must be recorded that having condemned society as the cause of his misfortune, he took it upon himself to pass judgement on the Providence which had created society, and this, too, he condemned. Thus during those nineteen years of torture and enslavement his spirit both grew and shrank. Light entered on one side and darkness on the other.
As we have seen, he was not bad by nature; he had been still virtuous when he was sent to prison. There he learned to condemn society and felt himself becoming evil; he condemned Providence and knew that he became impious.
It is difficult at this point not to pause for a moment to reflect.
Can human nature be ever wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof? Is there not in every human soul, and was there not in the soul of
Jean Valjean, an essential spark, an element of the divine, indestructible in this world and immortal in the next, which goodness can preserve, nourish, and fan into glorious flame, and which evil can never quite extinguish?
These are weighty and obscure questions, to the last of which any psychologist would probably have answered no, had he seen Jean Valjean in Toulon during a rest period seated with arms crossed over a capstan-bar, the end of his chain thrust into his pocket to stop it dragging, a brooding galley-slave, sombre, silent, and vengeful, an outcast of the laws glaring in anger at men, one of the damned of civilization looking accusingly at Heaven.
There can be little doubt, and we may not pretend otherwise, that the observant psychologist would have seen in him a case of incurable abasement, a sick man for whom he might feel pity but for whom he could propose no remedy. He would have averted his gaze from the spiritual abysses he discerned and, like Dante at the gate of hell, have expunged from that life the word which God’s finger writes on the brow of every man, the word Hope.
And what of Valjean himself? Was the spiritual state which we have depicted as plain to him as we have sought to make it to the reader? Had he any clear perception, after they were formed, or during their formation, of the elements of which his moral degradation was composed? Could a man so crude and untaught take any positive account of the process whereby, by gradual stages, his spirit had risen and sunk into those depths which through the years had come to constitute his moral horizon? We cannot venture to say so, and in fact we do not believe it. He was too ignorant to be lucid in his thoughts, even after so much hardship. There were times when he could not be sure of his own feelings. He lived in shadow, suffered in shadow, hated the shadows and may be said to have hated himself. He lived in darkness fumbling like a blind man, a man in a dream. Only occasionally was he overtaken by a burst of furious rage, rising within him or provoked from without, that was an overflow of suffering, a swift, searing flame illuminating all his soul and shedding its ugly light on everything that lay behind him and ahead, the chasms and sombre vistas of his destiny.
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