Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  But these flashes passed, the darkness closed in again – and where was he? He did not know.

  It is characteristic of this form of punishment, inspired by all that is pitiless, that is to say brutalizing, that gradually, by a process of mindless erosion, it turns a man into an animal, sometimes a ferocious one. Jean Valjean’s repeated and obstinate efforts to escape are evidence of the effect of this legal chastisement on the human spirit. He would have made further hopeless attempts whenever the chance offered, without giving a thought to the consequences or to past experience. Like a caged wolf, he dashed madly for the door whenever he found it open. Instinct prompted him to run where reason would have bidden him stay: in the face of that overwhelming impulse, reason vanished. It was the animal that acted, and the added penalties inflicted on him when he was recaptured served only to increase its savagery.

  A detail which we must not fail to mention is that in physical strength Jean Valjean far surpassed any other inmate of the prison. On fatigue duties, or hauling an anchor-chain or turning a capstan, he was worth four men. He could lift and carry enormous weights and on occasion did duty for the appliance known as a ‘jack’, in those days called an orgueil, from which the Rue Montorgueil, near the Paris halles, derives its name. Once when the balcony of the Toulon town-hall was being repaired, one of the admirable caryatids by Puget which support it came loose and was in danger of falling. Valjean, who was on the spot, propped it up with his shoulder until help arrived.

  His dexterity was even greater than his strength. There are prisoners, obsessed with the thought of escape, eternally envious of the birds and the flies, who make a positive cult of the physical sciences, daily performing a mysterious ritual of exercises. The climbing of a sheer surface, where scarcely any hand or foothold was to be discerned, was to Valjean a pastime. Given the angle of a wall and applying the thrust of his back and legs, with elbows and heels gripping the rough surface of the stone, he could climb three storeys as though by magic; he had even reached the prison roof.

  He spoke seldom and never smiled. It took some extreme emotion to wring from him, perhaps once or twice in a year, the sour convict-chuckle that is like the laughter of demons. The sight of him suggested that he was continually absorbed in the contemplation of something terrible.

  And so he was. With the hazy perception of an unformed nature and an overborne intelligence, he was confusedly aware of something monstrous that oppressed him. Did he seek to look upward beyond the pallid half-light in which he crouched, it was to see, with mingled terror and rage, an endless structure rising above him, a dreadful piling-up of things, laws, prejudices, men and facts, whose shape he could not discern and whose mass appalled him, and which was nothing else than the huge pyramid that we call civilization. Here and there in the formless, swarming heap, near to him or at an inaccessible height, some detail would be thrown into sharp relief – the prison-warder with his truncheon, the gendarme with his sabre; above these the mitred bishop, and at the very top, like a sun, the Emperor radiantly crowned. Far from dispelling his own darkness, those distant splendours seemed only to intensify it. Life came and went above his head – laws, prejudices, facts, men and things – in the intricate and mysterious pattern God stamps on civilization, bearing down and crushing him with a placid cruelty and remorseless indifference. Men fallen into the nethermost pit of adversity, lost in that limbo where the eyes do not follow, those outcasts of the law feel upon their necks the whole weight of society, so formidable to the outsider, so terrifying to the underdog. It was in this situation that Jean Valjean pondered, and what could his thoughts be?

  What could they be but the thoughts of a grain of corn ground between millstones, if it were capable of thinking? All these things, reality charged with fantasy and fantasy laden with reality, ended by creating in him a frame of mind scarcely to be expressed in words. At times he would pause in his prison labours to stand reflective, and his reason, at once more mature and more disturbed, would recoil in disbelief. The things that happened to him seemed inconceivable, the world around him grotesque. He would say to himself: this is a dream, and stare at the warder standing a few feet away as though he were seeing a ghost – until suddenly the ghost dealt him a blow.

  He was almost unconscious of the natural world. It would be nearly true to say of Jean Valjean that for him the sun did not exist, or any summer day, or clear skies or April dawns. Heaven alone knows what sullied light filtered through to his soul.

  To sum up this account of him, so far as it can be done in concrete terms, we may say that in nineteen years Jean Valjean, the harmless tree-pruner of Faverolles and the sinister galley-slave of Toulon, thanks to the way imprisonment had shaped him, had become capable of two kinds of ill-deed: first the heedless, unpremeditated act executed in a blind fury, as some sort of a reprisal for the wrongs he had suffered; and secondly, the deliberate and considered crime, justified in his mind by the thoughts inspired by those wrongs. His calculated thinking passed through the three successive stages of reason, resolve and obstinacy which are only possible to natures of a certain kind. His impulses were governed by resentment, bitterness and a profound sense of injury which might vent itself even upon good and innocent people, if any such came his way. The beginning and the end of all his thought was hatred of human laws: a hatred which, if some providential happening does not arrest its growth, may swell in time into a hatred of all society, all mankind, all created things, becoming a savage and obsessive desire to inflict harm on no matter what or whom.

  It will be seen that the yellow ticket he carried had some warrant for describing Jean Valjean as ‘a very dangerous man’. Year by year, slowly but inexorably, his spirit had withered. Dry of heart and dry-eyed. During his nineteen years imprisonment he had not shed a tear.

  VIII

  Sea and shadow

  Man overboard!

  But the ship does not stop. The wind is blowing and the doom-laden vessel is set on a course from which it cannot depart. It sails on.

  The man sinks and reappears, flings up his arms and shouts, but no one hears. The ship, heeling in the wind, is intent upon its business, and passengers and crew have lost sight of him, a pinpoint in the immensity of the sea.

  He calls despairingly, gazing in anguish after the receding sail as, ghostlike, it fades from view. A short time ago he was on board, a member of the crew busy on deck with the rest, a living being with his share of air and sunlight. What has become of him now? He slipped and fell, and this is the end.

  He is adrift in the monstrous waters with only their turbulence beneath him, hideously enclosed by wave-crests shredded by the wind, smothered as they break over his head, tumbled from one to another, rising and sinking into unfathomable darkness where he seems to become a part of the abyss, his mouth filled with bitter resentment at this treacherous ocean that is so resolved to destroy him, this monster toying with his death. To him the sea has become the embodiment of hatred.

  But he goes on swimming, still struggles despairingly for life, his strength dwindling as he battles against the inexhaustible. Above him he can see only the bleak pallor of the clouds. He is the witness in his death-throes of the immeasurable dementia of the sea, and, tormented by this madness, he hears sounds unknown to man that seem to come from some dreadful place beyond the bounds of earth. There are birds flying amid the clouds as angels soar over the distresses of mankind, but what can they do for him? They sing as they glide and hover, while he gasps for life.

  He is lost between the infinities of sea and sky, the one a tomb, the other a shroud. Darkness is falling. He has swum for hours until his strength is at an end and the ship with its company of men has long since passed from sight. Solitary in the huge gulf of twilight he twists and turns, feeling the waves of the unknowable close in upon him. And for the last time he calls, but not to man. Where is God?

  He calls to anyone or anything – he calls and calls but there is no reply, nothing on the face of the waters, nothing in the heave
ns. He calls to the sea and spray, but they are deaf; he calls to the winds, but they are answerable only to infinity. Around him dusk and solitude, the heedless tumult of wild waters; within him terror and exhaustion; below him the descent into nothingness. No foothold. He pictures his body adrift in that limitless dark. The chill numbs him. His hands open and close, clutching at nothing. Wind and tumult and useless stars. What can he do? Despair ends in resignation, exhaustion chooses death, and so at length he gives up the struggle and his body sinks for ever.

  Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?

  IX

  Fresh tribulations

  When at the time of his leaving prison Jean Valjean heard the words, ‘You are free,’ the moment had seemed blinding and unbelievable, as though he were suddenly pierced by a shaft of light, the true light of living men. But this gleam swiftly faded. He had been dazzled by the idea of liberty. He had believed for an instant in a new life. He soon discovered the meaning of liberty when it is accompanied by a yellow ticket.

  And with this came further disillusion. He had calculated that his savings during his imprisonment would amount to one hundred and seventy-one francs. It must be said in fairness that he had omitted to allow for Sundays and feast-days, days of enforced rest which reduced this total by about twenty-four francs. But there had been other deductions conforming to prison regulations, and the sum he received was one hundred and nine francs and fifteen sous.

  He did not understand the reason for this and thought himself cheated – in plain language, robbed.

  In Grasse, on the day after his release, he saw some men unloading bales of orange-blossom outside a scent-distillery. He volunteered his labour, and since the matter was urgent he was taken on. He was intelligent, strong, and adroit; he worked well and the foreman seemed content. While he was at work a passing gendarme noticed him and asked to see his papers. He had to show the yellow ticket, after which he went back to work. Earlier he had asked one of the other men the rate of pay for the day and had been told that it was thirty sous. In the evening, since he was obliged to move on next morning, he went to the foreman and asked for his wage. Without saying anything the man handed him twenty-five sous, and said when he protested, ‘That’s good enough for you.’ He again protested and the foreman looked hard at him and said, ‘Watch it or you’ll be back inside.’

  Again he felt that he had been robbed. Society had robbed him wholesale of a part of his savings; now it was the turn of the individual to rob him in detail. Release, he discovered, was not deliverance. A man may leave prison, but he is still condemned.

  This was what had happened to him in Grasse. We know of his reception in Digne.

  X

  The man awakens

  Jean Valjean awoke as the cathedral clock was striking two.

  What had awakened him was an over-comfortable bed. He had not slept in a bed for twenty years, and although he had not taken off his clothes, the sensation was too unfamiliar not to disturb his sleep. Nevertheless he had slept for over four hours and recovered from his exhaustion. He was not accustomed to long hours of rest.

  He opened his eyes and peered into the darkness, then closed them hoping to fall asleep again. But after a day of various emotions, when many thoughts have oppressed the mind, we may fall once asleep but not a second time. Sleep comes more readily than it returns. This was the case with Valjean. He could not get to sleep again and lay thinking.

  He was in a state of great mental perturbation, assailed with a flood of old and new impressions which changed incessantly in shape, grew immeasurably, and suddenly vanished as though in a turgid stream. Many thoughts occurred to him, but there was one in particular that constantly returned, overshadowing the rest. It was the thought of the silver on the bishop’s table.

  Those silver knives and forks obsessed him. There they were, only a few yards away. He had seen Mme Magloire put them in the cupboard when he passed through the bishop’s room, and he had noted the position of the cupboard, on the right as one entered from the dining-room. They were solid pieces of old silver and with the big ladle would fetch at least two hundred francs – twice what he had earned in nineteen years, although it was true that he would have got more if the authorities had not robbed him.

  For a whole hour he remained in a state of indecision in which there was an element of conflict. The clock struck three. He opened his eyes again and sat up briskly, reaching out an arm to grope for the knapsack that he had let fall by the bedside. Then he swung his legs over and almost without knowing it found himself seated on the bed with his feet on the floor.

  He remained for some time in this posture, a sinister figure to anyone seeing him thus seated in the darkness, the only wakeful person in that sleeping house. Suddenly he bent down, removed his shoes and laid them very quietly on the bedside mat. Then he returned to his state of pensive immobility.

  The ugly thoughts jostled in his brain, came and went, bearing down on him like a physical weight; and at the same time, unaccountably, with the obstinate irrelevance of distracted meditation, he was thinking of something entirely different. One of his fellow-prisoners had been a man named Brevet who kept his trousers up with a single brace of knitted cotton. The check design of that brace repeatedly occurred to him.

  He might have stayed like this until daybreak if the clock had not sounded again, striking the quarter or half-hour. It roused him as though it had been a signal.

  He got to his feet and stood listening. The house was quite silent. He then moved cautiously towards the window, of which the outline was clearly discernible. The night was not very dark; there was a full moon intermittently hidden by large clouds scudding in the wind, creating out of doors an alternation of darkness and light, and indoors a sort of twilight, sufficient to move by, rising and dimming like the light from a basement window when people are passing outside. Having reached the window, Valjean examined it. It was not barred; it opened on to the garden and, after the local custom, was fastened only with a small latch. Cold air flooded the room when he opened it, and he quickly closed it again. He stared into the garden with the intent look of a man inspecting rather than seeing. It was enclosed in a low whitewashed wall, easy to climb. Beyond were trees spaced at regular intervals, indicating that the wall separated the garden from an avenue or planted lane.

  Having concluded his survey he turned with an air of decision, went back into the alcove, picked up his knapsack and got something out of it which he laid on the bed. He put his shoes in one of the pockets, buckled the knapsack and strapped it on his back, put his cap on his head, pulling the peak low over his eyes, and groped for his stick, which he had stood in a corner by the window. Returning to the bed, he picked up the object he had placed there. It was a short iron bar, sharpened to a point at one end.

  The darkness made it difficult to determine what purpose this piece of metal was designed to serve, whether it was intended for use as a lever or a bludgeon. By daylight it could have been seen to be an ordinary miner’s spike. The convicts were sometimes put to work stone-quarrying in the hills behind Toulon, and it was not uncommon for them to be in possession of miners’ tools. The spike of thick, solid metal was used for splitting rock.

  Grasping it in his right hand and holding his breath, Valjean moved stealthily towards the door of the bishop’s bedroom. He found it ajar. The bishop had not closed it.

  XI

  What he did

  Valjean stood listening. There was no sound.

  He gave the door a gentle push with one finger-tip, cautious as a cat planning to enter a room. It yielded soundlessly, opening a little wider. He paused, then
pushed again.

  The door still made no sound, and now it was wide enough open for him to pass through; but close by it was a small table set at an awkward angle which still blocked his passage. There was nothing for it but to open the door wider still. Summoning his resolution, he gave it a third and more vigorous push, and this time one of the hinges emitted a long and piercing squeak.

  Jean Valjean shivered. The sound was as appalling to him as that of the Last Trump. In those first wild moments of dismay he could almost believe that the hinge had become endowed with supernatural life and was barking like a watchdog to warn the sleepers in the house. He sank quivering back on his heels, hearing the blood thunder in his temples while the noise of his breath was like wind roaring out of a cave. It seemed to him impossible that the dreadful din would not arouse the household as effectively as an earthquake. The door had given the alarm. The old man would start up, the old woman would scream, help would come running; within a quarter of an hour the town would be in an uproar and the gendarmes would be active. During those moments he thought he was lost.

  He stayed where he was, stock still and not daring to move. Several minutes passed. The door was now wide open. He ventured to peer into the room. Nothing stirred. He listened and heard no sound of movement in the house. It seemed that the rusty hinge had not awakened anyone.