Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  Then again the thought occurred to him that perhaps when he gave himself up, the nobility of the act would be taken into account, his honourable life during the past seven years, the good he had done, and that because of this he would be exonerated. But he quickly dismissed this thought, reflecting bitterly that the theft of those forty sous from Petit-Gervais would certainly be recalled, and that by this act he had become a recidivist, subject to hard-labour in perpetuity under the stringent terms of the law.

  Setting aside all illusion, he sought to detach himself from earthly things and to find strength and consolation elsewhere. He told himself that he must do his duty and that perhaps he would be no more unhappy when he had done it than if he evaded it and allowed the honour and dignity, the high esteem, the wealth and popularity of Monsieur Madeleine to be rendered secretly shameful by a criminal act – and what sort of taste would that leave in his mouth? Whereas, if he made the sacrifice, all would be redeemed – the squalor of imprisonment, the suffering, the endless labour and ignominy – ly the assurance in his heart.

  Finally he said to himself that in any event it was unavoidable. This was his destiny and he could not alter what had been ordained. The choice had been forced upon him between outward virtue and inward infamy, or outward degradation and purity of heart.

  This play of melancholy thoughts did not lessen his courage but it wearied his brain. He began to think at random of irrelevant things. He was still pacing the room, with the blood beating violently at his temples. Midnight sounded, first from the parish church and then from the Town Hall. He counted the strokes, mentally comparing the two clocks, and this caused him to recall that a few days before he had seen in a second-hand shop an old clock bearing the name Antoine Albin de Romainville. He was cold. He stirred the fire, but it did not occur to him to shut the window.

  He was falling into a state of apathy, and it cost him an effort to recall what he had been thinking about before midnight sounded. Finally he remembered. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have decided to give myself up.’

  Then suddenly he thought of Fantine. ‘That poor woman!’ he exclaimed.

  The abrupt recollection, coming as it were out of the blue, seemed to shed an entirely new light on his predicament. He exclaimed:

  ‘But …! I have been thinking of nothing but myself and my own peace of mind. I am to keep quiet or give myself up – stay hidden or save my soul – live on as a respected, despicable mayor or as a despised but honourable galley-slave. All this is pure egotism. What if I were to think of others, as our Christian duty requires?’

  He began now to consider the consequences of his departure from the scene. The town and the whole region would suffer, the industry he had created, the workpeople, men and women and children, the old and needy, the many families who depended on him. He had come to a place that was moribund and made it prosperous, brought life to a desert. With his going that life would start to ebb, without him the place would sink and die. And did he owe nothing to Fan-tine, for whose sufferings he was in some degree responsible? He had promised to retrieve her child. If he failed in this, she too would surely the, and the Lord knew what would become of the child. All this would follow if he gave himself up. And what if he did not?

  He paused on the question, seeming to hesitate for an instant and tremble; but then he resumed calmly:

  ‘A man will go to life-imprisonment. But he was guilty of theft, no need to pretend otherwise. And I shall stay where I am, and that mother will be able to bring up her child. In ten years I shall have amassed ten millions and this will enrich the whole community. The money means nothing to me. The whole region will benefit – greater prosperity, new industries, more people. New villages will spring up where now there are only farms, and farms where now there is only waste land. Want will be abolished, and with it the crimes and vices that it causes. A rich and smiling land! And all this is to be sacrificed for what? For my personal gratification, for the sake of an heroic gesture, an act of melodrama. A woman is to the in hospital and her child on the streets, a whole community is to suffer, to save a man from a punishment which may or may not be excessive (he may well deserve it for something else; he is an old rascal anyway who cannot have long to live) – and in order that my private conscience may be appeased. But that is madness! If there is to be a weight on my conscience it is my own affair. My duty is to others, not to myself.’

  He got up and again began to pace the room, feeling now that his conscience was at rest. Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind. It seemed to him that having penetrated to those depths, having groped in the heart of darkness, he had found and grasped a diamond of truth that now lay gleaming in his hand.

  ‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘this is the right course. There has to be a guiding principle. My mind is made up. I shall leave things as they are and there will be no more vacillation. I am Madeleine and will continue to be Madeleine, and as for the man who now bears the name of Valjean, so much the worse for him. I am no longer Valjean, I do not know him and he is no concern of mine. If another man has been inflicted with his name, that is the work of Chance, and Chance alone is responsible.’ He looked at himself in the mirror over the mantelshelf. ‘Oh, the relief of having decided! Already I feel a new man.’

  He resumed his pacing of the room, but abruptly stopped, arrested by the thought that, now his decision had been taken, he must shirk none of its consequences. There were still objects concealed in that room which linked him with Jean Valjean and might bear witness against him if they were not destroyed.

  Getting a small key out of his purse, he inserted it in a keyhole which was scarcely visible even to himself, so lost was it in the darker tints of the wallpaper. He opened the door of a cupboard, a sort of wardrobe built in between the projecting chimney and the corner of the room. The cupboard contained some rags of underclothing, a blue canvas smock, an old pair of trousers, a knapsack, and a stick with a ferrule at either end. Anyone who had seen Jean Valjean on his way through Digne in October 1815 would have recognized these things.

  He had preserved them, with the silver candlesticks, as a reminder of the day when he had started life anew. But whereas he hid the prison relics, the bishop’s candlesticks were openly displayed.

  He looked furtively towards the door as though he feared that it might suddenly open, bolted though it was; then with a single, rapid movement, and without a glance at the relics which he had perilously guarded for so long, he tossed the whole bundle, rags, stick and knapsack, on to the fire. He closed the cupboard and as an added precaution, meaningless now that it was empty, moved a large piece of furniture in front of it to conceal the door.

  In a very short time the room was lit up as the bundle burst into flame, while the thorn stick crackled, sending sparks far across the floor.

  As the knapsack with its squalid contents disintegrated, something gleamed amid the embers. Closer examination would have shown that it was a coin – doubtless the forty-sou piece stolen from a small boy. But he was not looking at the fire. He had resumed his steady pacing of the room.

  His eye was caught suddenly by the faint reflection of firelight in the silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece. ‘Another reminder of Jean Valjean,’ he thought. ‘I must get rid of them.’ And he took them down.

  The fire was still hot enough to melt them into a shapeless lump of metal. For a moment he bent over it, warming himself with a genuine sense of comfort. ‘How pleasant the heat is,’ he thought. He stirred the embers with one of the candlesticks. In another minute both would have been on the fire.

  But at that moment it seemed to him that he heard a voice speaking within him.

  ‘Jean Valjean! Jean Valjean!’

  The words filled him with terror, and the hair rose on his scalp.

  ‘So be it,’ said the voice. ‘Finish what you have begun. Destroy the candlesticks, blot out the memory, forget the bishop, forget everything and think well of yourself. You have
decided! An old man who understands nothing of what has happened, whose only crime may be that your name is now inflicted upon him, is to be sentenced in your place, condemned for the rest of his days to abjection and servitude. And you will remain an upright citizen, the respected and honoured Monsieur le maire. You will enrich the town, feed the poor, protect the orphan and live happy in the light of every man’s esteem while another man wears the blue smock and the fetters which are rightly yours and bears your name in degradation. How fortunately things have turned out for you!’

  The sweat had started on his brow and he stared haggardly into the flame. But the speaker in his heart had still not finished.

  ‘Many voices will praise you, Jean Valjean, many will bless you, but there is one man who will not hear them and will curse you in his darkness. Take good heed! The blessings will fall away before they are heard in Heaven, and only the curse will reach God!’

  The voice, weak at first and rising from the depths of his conscience, had gained in power until it rang in his ears, seeming now to come from somewhere outside himself, the last words so loud that he gazed round in terror and cried:

  ‘Is someone there?’ then answered the question with a foolish laugh: ‘I’m being stupid. There can’t be anyone.’

  There was someone none the less, but it was not someone whom the human eye could see.

  He put the candlesticks back on the mantlepiece, and the mournful regularity of his footsteps up and down the room disturbed the slumbers of the sleeper in the room below.

  The act of walking both soothed and stimulated him. There are moments of crisis when we seek release in movement, as though to take council with any random object that meets our eye. But now it served only to heighten the consciousness of his predicament. The ironic chance that this man Champmathieu should have been mistaken for himself, and that this accident, which Providence seemed to have contrived for his salvation, must also cut the ground from beneath his feet! He had taken two decisions and now he recoiled from both, finding each unthinkable.

  For a moment, and in utter despair, he envisaged the consequences of giving himself up, all he would be losing and what he would be getting in its place. He would be saying good-bye to a blameless and happy life, to honour, liberty, and every man’s esteem. He would be free no longer to walk the fields, listen to birdsong, give pennies to the children. No look of warmth and gratitude would meet his gaze. He would leave the house he had built and this small room he lived in, which now seemed to him so pleasant; and the old concierge, his only servant, would no longer bring him his coffee in the morning. All this would go, and in its place would be the chain-gang and the convict smock, the plank bed and the cell, all the horrors that he knew. At his age, after becoming what he now was! If he were still young … But an old man, barefoot in iron-shod clogs, subject to insult and ill-usage, forced to show a leg morning and evening to the warder who inspected his fetters; a sight to be shown to the casual visitor, who would be told, ‘That’s the famous Jean Valjean, the one who was the Mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer’ … Fate, it seemed, could be as malignant as the human intelligence, as remorseless as the human heart!

  Whichever way he turned, he faced the same alternatives – to cling to his paradise and become a devil, or become a saint by going back to hell. In God’s name, what was he to do?

  He was beset again with the mental agonies which for a time he had so painfully dispelled, and his thinking again became confused, lapsing into the apathetic sluggishness that is a part of despair. A name, Romainville, floated into his memory, and with it two lines of a song he had once heard. Romainville, he recalled, was a wood near Paris where young lovers went to gather lilac in April. He was lurching physically as well as spiritually, like an infant walking for the first time.

  Struggling with this growing lassitude, he sought to bring some order into his thoughts, striving still to confront, and resolve for good and all, the dilemma which had brought him to this state of exhaustion: should he give himself up or keep silent? But he could see nothing clearly. The notions that flooded through his mind were becoming clouded, vanishing in smoke. One thing alone was plain to him, that whichever way he went something in him must inevitably die. Whether he turned right or left the end was a sepulchre, the death of one thing or the other, happiness or virtue. For the rest, all his uncertainties had returned. He was no further advanced than when he had begun.

  Thus he strove in torment as another man had striven eighteen hundred years before him, the mysterious Being in whom were embodied all the saintliness and suffering of mankind. He too while the olive-leaves quivered around him, had again and again refused the terrible cup of darkness urged upon him beneath a sky filled with stars.

  IV

  Suffering in sleep

  The clocks had struck three, and he had been pacing the room almost without pause for five hours, when at length he sank into his chair. He fell asleep and dreamed.

  Like most dreams, this one was related to his situation only in its sense of heart-break and doom. Nevertheless it made so great an impression on him that later he wrote it down. His account of it is among the documents left behind after his death, and since the story of that night would be incomplete without it, we reproduce it here. It is the sombre fantasy of a sick soul.

  The inscription on the envelope reads: ‘What I dreamed that night’.

  I was in the country, a vast, barren landscape where there seemed to be neither day nor night.

  I was walking with my brother, the brother of my childhood years, of whom I may say I never think and whom I have almost forgotten.

  We were talking and people passed us. We were talking about a woman, formerly a neighbour of ours, who when she was living in the same street always worked with her window open. As we talked about her we felt the chill of that open window.

  There were no trees to be seen.

  A man passed close to us. He was naked, the colour of ashes, and he was riding a horse the colour of earth. He was hairless, we could see his bare skull and the veins on his skull. He carried a wand in his hand, supple as a vine-twig and heavy as iron. He passed by and said nothing.

  My brother said, ‘Let us go by the sunken road.’

  There was no shrub to be seen in the sunken road, nor any patch of moss. Everything was the colour of earth, even the sky. I said something as we walked along, and there was no reply. I found that my brother was no longer there.

  I came to a village and thought when I saw it that it must be Romainville (why Romainville?).

  The street by which I entered was deserted. I turned into a second street. At the corner of the two streets a man was standing with his back to the wall. I asked him, ‘What is this place? Where am I?’ He did not answer. I saw the open door of a house and went in.

  There was no one in the first room. I went into the next. Behind the door of this room a man was standing with his back to the wall. I asked him: ‘Whose house is this? Where am I?’ He did not answer. The house had a garden.

  I went into the garden. It was empty. Behind the first tree I found a man standing. I asked him: ‘What garden is this? Where am I?’ He did not answer.

  I wandered through the village and perceived that it was a town. All the streets were deserted, all the doors were open. No living person passed along the streets or moved in the rooms or walked in the gardens. But at every street-corner, and behind every doorway and every tree, a man stood and was silent. I never saw more than one at a time. They watched me as I passed.

  I left the town and walked on through the fields.

  After a time I looked back and saw a large crowd coming behind me. I recognized all the men I had seen in the town. They bore themselves strangely. Without seeming to hurry they were walking faster than I. They made no sound as they walked. In a very little while they had caught up with me and surrounded me. The men’s faces were the colour of earth.

  The man whom I had first seen and questioned when I entered the town now said to me: �
��Where are you going? Don’t you know that you have been dead for a long time?’

  I opened my mouth to reply, and found that there was no one there.

  He awoke from his dream. He was very cold. A wind as chill as the wind at daybreak was causing the frame of the open window to creak in its hinges. The fire had gone out and the candle was nearly burnt down. The night was still black.

  He got up and went to the window. There were still no stars in the sky.

  From the window he could see the courtyard and the street. A sudden sharp sound caused him to look down. He saw two red stars below him, their rays oddly expanding and contracting in the darkness. ‘No stars in the sky,’ he thought, still bemused by his dream. ‘They are on earth instead.’

  This illusion was dispelled by a repetition of the sound, which woke him up completely. He saw that the two stars were the lamps of a carriage of which he could now distinguish the shape. It was a tilbury with a small white horse between the shafts, and the sound he had heard was that of the horse’s hoofs on the cobbles.

  ‘What is it doing here?’ he wondered. ‘Who can have called at this hour?’

  At this moment there was a timid knock on the door. He shivered from head to foot and cried in a voice of fury:

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘It’s me, Monsieur le maire.’

  He recognized the voice of the old woman, his servant.

  ‘Well, what’s the matter?’

  ‘It will soon be five o’clock, Monsieur le maire.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The carriage is here.’

  ‘What carriage?’

  ‘The tilbury.’

  ‘What tilbury?’

  ‘Did not Monsieur le maire order a tilbury?’

  ‘No,’ he answered.

  ‘The driver says he has brought it for you.’

  ‘What driver?’

  ‘Master Scaufflaire’s driver.’