Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  That peril was over, but although he was still in a state of great perturbation he did not turn back. He had not turned back even when he thought he was done for. His only thought was to get the business over quickly. He moved on into the bedroom.

  It was perfectly quiet. Vague shapes were discernible which by daylight would have been seen to be papers scattered over a table, open folios, books piled on a stool, garments draped over a chair, a prie-dieu, now only visible as contrasts of light and shadow. Valjean moved cautiously forward, hearing from the far side of the room the quiet, steady breathing of the bishop. He came to an abrupt stop at the bedside, finding that he had reached it sooner than he expected.

  Nature at times adds her own commentary to our actions with a kind of sombre and considered eloquence, as though she were bidding us reflect. For nearly half an hour the sky had been darkened by cloud. At the moment when Jean Valjean stopped by the bed the clouds were torn asunder as though by a deliberate act, and moonlight, flooding through the tall window, fell upon the bishop’s face. He was sleeping peacefully. Because of the coldness of night in the lower Alps he wore a bed-jacket of brown wool which covered his arms to the wrists. His head lay back on the pillow in the abandonment of repose, and the hand wearing the episcopal ring, a hand responsible for so much that was good and well done, hung down outside the sheets. His face wore a look of serenity, hope, and beatitude, something more than a smile and little short of radiance, the reflection of light that was not to be seen. The spirits of the righteous in sleep commune with a mysterious heaven.

  It was the light of this heaven that lay upon the bishop, a luminosity emanating from himself, the light of his own conscience. At the moment when the moon shone upon him, mingling with his inner light, he seemed in the soft half-dark to wear a halo. The brightness of the moon, the stillness of the garden, the quietness of the house, the deep repose of the hour, all this conferred a tranquil majesty upon the venerable white head now sunk in childlike sleep, an unconscious nobility approaching the divine.

  Motionless in the shadow, gripping the spike in his hand, Jean Valjean stood gazing in a kind of terror at the old man. He had never before seen anything like this. On the moral plane there can be no more moving contrast than that between an uneasy conscience, bent upon a misdeed, and the unguarded slumber of innocence. In that solitary confrontation there was an element of the sublime of which Valjean was obscurely but strongly aware.

  No one, not even himself, could have described his feeling. We have to imagine utmost violence in the presence of utmost gentleness. Nothing could have been discerned with certainty from his expression, which was one of haggard astonishment. He stood looking down and no one could have read his thoughts. That he was profoundly moved was evident, but what was the nature of his emotion?

  He looked away from the bed. All that clearly emerged from his attitude and expression was that he was in a state of strange indecision, seemingly adrift between the two extremes of death on the one hand and salvation on the other – ready to shatter that skull or to kiss that hand.

  After some moments he slowly raised his left arm and removed his cap; then, letting his arm sink as slowly as he had raised it, he resumed his attitude of contemplation, holding the cap in his left hand and the weapon in his right, the hair unruly on his wild head, while the bishop continued to sleep peacefully beneath his terrifying gaze. Above the mantelpiece the crucifix was dimly visible with its arms extended as though to both men, in benediction of the one and forgiveness of the other.

  Valjean suddenly put his cap back on his head and without looking at the bishop moved quickly to the cupboard. He raised the spike, prepared to force the lock, but the key was in it. The first thing he saw when he opened the door was the basket of silver. He grabbed it, crossed the room with long strides regardless of precaution, re-entered the oratory, picked up his stick, opened the window, climbed over the sill, emptied the silver into his knapsack, threw away the basket, crossed the garden and, scrambling like a great cat over the wall, took to his heels.

  XII

  The bishop at work

  At sunrise that morning Monsieur Bienvenu was in his garden. Mme Magloire came running out to him in great agitation.

  ‘Monseigneur, monseigneur, do you know where the silver-basket is?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the bishop.

  ‘Thank the Lord! I couldn’t think what had happened to it.’

  The bishop had just retrieved the basket from one of the flowerbeds. He handed it to her saying, ‘Here you are.’

  ‘But it’s empty!’ she exclaimed. ‘Where’s the silver?’

  ‘So it’s the silver you’re worrying about?’ said the bishop. ‘I can’t tell you where that is.’

  ‘Heaven save us, it has been stolen! That man who came last night!’

  With the zeal of an elderly watchdog Mme Magloire ran into the oratory, peered into the alcove and came running back to her master, who was now bending sadly over a cochlearia that had been damaged by the basket when it fell.

  ‘Monseigneur, the man’s gone! The silver has been stolen!’ She was looking about her as she spoke. The wall bore traces of the thief’s departure, one of its coping-stones having been dislodged. ‘That’s the way he went – he climbed into the lane! The monster – he’s gone off with our silver!’

  The bishop after a moment’s pause turned his grave eyes on her and said gently:

  ‘In the first place, was it really ours?’

  Mme Magloire stood dumbfounded. After a further silence the bishop went on:

  ‘I think I was wrong to keep it so long. It belonged to the poor. And what was that man if not one of them?’

  ‘Saints alive!’ exclaimed Mme Magloire. ‘It’s not on my account or Mademoiselle’s. But Monseigneur – what will Monseigneur eat with now?’

  He looked at her in seeming astonishment. ‘There is always pewter.’

  ‘Pewter smells.’

  ‘Well then, iron.’

  ‘Iron has a taste.’

  ‘Then,’ said the bishop, ‘wooden forks and spoons.’

  A few minutes later he was breakfasting at the table where Jean Valjean had sat the night before and remarking cheerfully to his sister, who kept silent, and to Mme Magloire, who muttered under her breath, that no spoon or fork, even wooden ones, was needed for dipping bread into a bowl of milk.

  ‘After all, what can you expect?’ soliloquized Mme Magloire as she bustled to and fro. ‘Taking in a man like that and putting him to sleep in the alcove. The mercy is we were only robbed. It makes me shudder!’

  As the brother and sister were in the act of rising from the table a knock sounded on the door and the bishop called, ‘Come in!’

  The door opened to disclose a dramatic group. Three men were holding a fourth by the arms and neck. The three were gendarmes; the fourth was Jean Valjean.

  A sergeant of gendarmes, who had been standing by the door and was evidently in charge of the party, entered the room and saluted.

  ‘Monseigneur –’ he began.

  At this Valjean, who was looking crushed and woebegone, raised his head in stupefaction.

  ‘Monseigneur …’ he repeated. ‘He isn’t the curé?’

  ‘Silence,’ said one of the gendarmes. ‘This is his lordship the Bishop.’

  Monseigneur Bienvenu was meanwhile coming towards them as rapidly as his age allowed.

  ‘So here you are!’ he cried to Valjean. ‘I’m delighted to see you. Had you forgotten that I gave you the candlesticks as well? They’re silver like the rest, and worth a good two hundred francs. Did you forget to take them?’

  Jean Valjean’s eyes had widened. He was now staring at the old man with an expression no words can convey.

  ‘Monseigneur,’ said the sergeant, ‘do I understand that this man was telling the truth? When we saw him he seemed to be on the run, and we thought we had better make sure. We found this silver in his knapsack and –’

  ‘And he told you,’ said th
e bishop, smiling, ‘that it had been given him by an old priest with whom he stopped the night. I can see how it was. You felt bound to bring him here, but you were mistaken.’

  ‘You mean,’ said the sergeant, ‘that we can let him go?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  The gendarmes released Valjean, who seemed to cringe. ‘Am I really allowed to go?’ he said, mumbling the words as if he were talking in his sleep.

  ‘You heard, didn’t you?’ said a gendarme.

  ‘But this time,’ said the bishop, ‘you must not forget your candlesticks.’

  He fetched them from the mantelpiece and handed them to Valjean. The two women watched him do so without seeking by word or look to interfere. Valjean was trembling. He took the candlesticks mechanically and with a distracted air.

  ‘And now,’ said the bishop, ‘go in peace. Incidentally, my friend, when next you come here you need not go through the garden. This door is never locked.’ He turned to the gendarmes. ‘Thank you, gentlemen.’

  The gendarmes withdrew. Valjean stayed motionless as though he were on the verge of collapse. The bishop came up to him and said in a low voice:

  ‘Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man.’

  Valjean, who did not recall having made any promise, was silent. The bishop had spoken the words slowly and deliberately. He concluded with a solemn emphasis:

  ‘Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.’

  XIII

  Petit-Gervais

  Jean Valjean left the town as though he were still on the run. He plunged into the countryside, blindly following lanes and footpaths and not realizing that he was going in circles. Thus he spent the morning, without eating or feeling any sense of hunger. He was overwhelmed by new and strange sensations, among them a kind of anger, he did not know against whom. He could not have said if he was uplifted or humiliated. He had moments of strange tenderness which he resisted with all the hardness of heart which twenty years had brought him. His state of mind was physically exhausting. He perceived with dismay that the kind of dreadful calm instilled in him by injustice and misfortune had begun to crumble. What was to take its place? At moments he positively wished himself back in prison, and that these things had never happened to him; at least he would have been less distraught. Although it was late in the year there were still a few last flowers in the hedges whose scent as he passed recalled pictures of his childhood; and these memories, so long buried, were almost intolerable.

  Thus he spent the day in a state of growing turmoil; and in the evening, when the sun had sunk so low that every pebble cast a shadow, he was seated on the ground by a thicket, in an expanse of russet plain that was totally deserted. Only the Alps were visible on the horizon; not so much as a village church-steeple was to be seen. He was then perhaps seven miles from Digne, and a footpath crossed the plain a few yards from the place where he sat.

  Into his sombre meditations, which must have rendered his ragged appearance still more alarming to any passer-by, a lively sound intruded. A boy of about ten was coming along the footpath, singing as he came. He carried a vielle, a kind of small hurdy-gurdy, slung over his shoulder, and a box with his belongings on his back; one of those gay and harmless child vagrants, generally chimneysweeps, who go from village to village with knees showing through the holes in their trousers. Now and then he paused, still singing, to play at ‘bones’ with the coins he was carrying, tossing them in the air and catching them on the back of his hand. They probably represented his entire fortune, and one was a piece of forty sous.

  He stopped by the thicket to play his game without having noticed Jean Valjean. Thus far he had caught all the coins, but this time he dropped the forty-sou piece, which rolled in the direction of Valjean, who promptly set his foot on it.

  The boy had seen where it went. Without appearing in any way disconcerted, he went up to him.

  The place was entirely solitary with no other soul in sight on the footpath or the plain, and no sound except the distant cry of a flock of birds passing high overhead. The boy stood with his back to the setting sun, which lighted his hair with threads of gold and cast a red glare on Valjean’s brooding face.

  ‘Monsieur,’ said the boy with the childish trustfulness that is a mingling of innocence and ignorance, ‘may I have my coin?’

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Valjean.

  ‘Petit-Gervais, Monsieur.’

  ‘Clear out,’ said Valjean.

  ‘Please, Monsieur,’ said the child, ‘may I have my money back?’

  Jean Valjean lowered his head and did not reply.

  ‘Please, Monsieur.’

  Valjean was staring at the ground.

  ‘My money!’ the boy cried. ‘My piece of silver. My coin!’

  Valjean seemed not to hear him. The boy seized hold of his collar and shook him, while at the same time he tried to shift the heavy, iron-studded shoe covering his coin.

  ‘I want my money, my forty-sou piece!’

  He began to cry, and Jean Valjean, who was still seated, raised his head. His eyes were troubled. He stared with a sort of amazement at the child, then reached for his stick and cried in a terrifying voice, ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘It’s me, Monsieur. Petit-Gervais. Only me. Give me back my forty sous, if you please. Will you please move your foot?’

  Then the boy grew angry, small as he was, and his tone became almost threatening.

  ‘Move your foot, can’t you! Are you going to move your foot?’

  ‘Are you still there?’ said Valjean, suddenly standing up but still keeping his foot on the coin. ‘Damn you, clear out!’

  The boy looked at him and was suddenly frightened. After a moment of stupefaction he turned and ran, without looking back or uttering a sound. Out of breath, he eventually came to a stop, and amid the tumult of his thoughts Valjean heard the sound of his distant sobbing. A minute later he had vanished from sight.

  The sun had set. The shadows were closing about Jean Valjean. He had eaten nothing all day and was probably feverish. He remained standing in the same place, not having moved since the boy had run off. While his breath came slowly and unevenly his eyes were fixed on a spot some yards in front of him, as though he were wholly absorbed in contemplating a blue fragment of broken pottery lying in the grass. He shivered suddenly, conscious of the chill of evening.

  He pulled down the peak of his cap, tried mechanically to fasten his shirt over his chest and then stooped to pick up his stick. In doing so his eye caught the glitter of the forty-sou piece, half buried by his foot in the earth.

  It affected him like an electric shock. ‘What’s that?’ he muttered under his breath. He stepped back a couple of paces and then stood still, unable to detach his gaze from that object shining in the dusk like an eye watching him. After some moments’ pause he moved convulsively forward, snatched up the coin and then stood gazing to every point of the compass, quivering like a frightened animal in search of a hiding-place.

  There was nothing to be seen. Night was falling, the plain was cold and empty and a purple mist was rising to obscure the twilight. He uttered an exclamation and began to walk rapidly in the direction taken by the boy. After going a hundred yards or so he stopped and stared again but still saw nothing. He shouted at the top of his voice:

  ‘Petit-Gervais! Petit-Gervais!’

  He waited, but there was no reply.

  He was standing in the midst of gloom and desolation, surrounded by nothing but the dusk in which his gaze was lost and the silence in which his voice died away. A keen wind had begun to blow, endowing the objects around him with a kind of dismal life. Bushes waved their branches with a strange fury, as though they were threatening and pursuing.

  He went on walking and then broke into a run, stopping now and then to cry out amid the s
olitude in a voice that was at once terrifying and despairing, ‘Petit-Gervais! Petit-Gervais!’ If the boy had heard he would certainly have hidden; but by now he was probably far away.

  Valjean presently met a priest on horseback. He went up to him and asked:

  ‘Monsieur le curé, have you seen a boy go by?’

  ‘No,’ said the priest.

  ‘A boy called Petit-Gervais.’

  ‘No. I’ve seen no one.’

  Valjean produced two five-franc pieces and handed them to the priest.

  ‘For your poor, Monsieur le curé … He was a boy of about ten with a box on his back, I think, and carrying a vielle. He was tramping, a chimney-sweep or something of the kind.’

  ‘I haven’t seen him.’

  ‘Petit-Gervais his name was. Doesn’t he come from one of the villages round here?’

  ‘I think not,’ said the priest. ‘It sounds as though he was a stranger in these parts, a vagrant. We get them from time to time. We know nothing about them.’

  With an almost savage gesture Valjean produced two more five-franc pieces and gave them to the priest. ‘For your poor,’ he said again. And then he cried out: ‘Monsieur l’abbé, you must have me arrested. I’m a thief.’

  The priest clapped his heels to his horse’s flanks and rode off in terror.

  Valjean continued to run in the same direction as before. He ran for a long time, calling as he went, but he saw no one else. Several times he turned aside to inspect a patch of shadow which might have been a person lying or crouching, but these turned out to be bushes or small boulders. Finally, at a place where three paths intersected, he stood still. Gazing into the distance he called for the last time, ‘Petit-Gervais! Petit-Gervais!’ and his voice sank without echo into the mist. He again murmured, ‘Petit-Gervais,’ so faintly that the words were scarcely audible, and this was his last attempt. His legs suddenly buckled under him as though some unseen power had struck him down with all the weight of his guilty conscience. He sank exhausted on to a piece of rock with his hands clutching his hair and his head between his knees, and he exclaimed, ‘Vile wretch that I am!’