‘A woman!’ said Madeleine.
‘Of course. The woman Limosin. But what did you have in mind?’
‘It doesn’t matter. But if the case is over why are the lights still on?’
‘They’re trying another case. It started a couple of hours ago.’
‘What case is that?’
‘Another simple one. A recidivist, an ex-convict, charged with theft. I forget the name. But a rascal, if ever I saw one. The mere look of him is enough to get him sent back to the galleys.’
‘Would it be possible, Monsieur, for me to get into the court-room?’
‘I very much doubt it. It’s very crowded. But there is a temporary adjournment and perhaps some people will be leaving. You might manage when the court resumes.’
‘Where does one go in?’
‘Through that door.’
The lawyer left him. In the two or three minutes of that conversation Madeleine had been assailed by every conceivable emotion. The lawyer’s casual words had pierced him like needles of ice and like shafts of fire. When he heard that the case was not yet over he had drawn a deep breath, but whether of relief or anguish he could not have said.
He drew near to several of the murmuring groups and listened to what they were saying.
The court had so much business before it that the presiding judge had decreed that these two relatively brief and simple cases should be disposed of on the one day. They had first taken the infanticide and were now dealing with the case of the ex-convict, the ‘old lag’. He was charged with stealing apples, but this had not been proved. What had been proved, however, was that he had served a long term of imprisonment in Toulon, and this was what made the matter serious. The examination of the accused was completed and the depositions of the witnesses had been heard, but there remained the pleas of the prosecutor and the defending attorney, and it was unlikely that the business would be over before midnight. The prosecutor was a very capable advocate – he seldom failed to ‘get his man’ – and was, moreover, a person of refinement who wrote poetry.
An usher was standing by the door leading to the court-room. Madeleine asked him:
‘Will this door soon be opened?’
‘It won’t be opened at all,’ the usher said.
‘Not even when the session is resumed? It’s adjourned for the moment, isn’t it?’
‘They have just resumed, but the door won’t be opened. The hall’s already full.’
‘You mean there’s not a single place?’
‘Not one. No one can be allowed in.’ Then the usher added: ‘As a matter of fact, there are one or two seats behind the president’s chair, but these are reserved for persons holding public office.’ After which he turned his back on him.
Madeleine withdrew and with a lowered head crossed the antechamber and started slowly down the stairway, pausing in deep preoccupation at every step. The violent inner conflict that had absorbed him since the previous evening was still unresolved; new aspects of the matter constantly occurred to him. When he reached the half-landing he leaned against the balustrade with his arms folded. Suddenly he unbuttoned his greatcoat, got out his pocket-book and a pencil, and by the light of the stairway lantern wrote hastily on a sheet of paper which he tore out of the pocket-book, ‘M. Madeleine, Mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer.’ He then ran up the stairs, thrust his way through the crowd in the antechamber, and handed the slip of paper to the usher, saying in an authoritative tone, ‘Kindly take this to the presiding judge.’
The usher glanced at the paper and obeyed.
VIII
Admission by privilege
Without being aware of it the mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer had acquired a degree of celebrity. His high reputation in the Lower Boulonnais had spread beyond the borders of that region into the neighbouring departments. Apart from the service he had rendered the town by reviving the jet industry, there was not one of the 141 communes comprising the administrative district of Montreuil-sur-mer that did not owe him something. The manufacture of tulle at Boulogne, and the textile industries at Frévent and Boubers-sur-Canche had all benefited by his financial assistance. The name of Madeleine was everywhere held in high esteem, and towns such as Arras and Douai envied the fortunate small town of Montreuil-sur-mer.
The Councillor of the King’s Court at Douai, who was presiding over the assize court at Arras, was therefore familiar with his name. When the usher, discreetly bending over his chair, handed him the slip of paper saying, ‘The gentleman would like to be present at the hearing,’ he at once nodded, scribbled a line on the bottom of the slip, and ordered him to be shown in.
The unhappy man himself had remained standing where the usher had left him, in the same oppressed attitude. The voice which now intruded on his thoughts was very different in tone from that of the haughty attendant who had turned his back on him a few minutes before. Bowing obsequiously, the usher said, ‘If your honour would be so good as to follow me,’ at the same time returning the slip of paper. Madeleine was near enough to the lamp to be able to read, ‘The President of the Court presents his compliments to Monsieur Madeleine.’ Crumpling the paper as though the words had left a bitter taste in his mouth, he followed the usher.
A minute or two later he was standing in a sombre, oak-panelled room lighted by two candles on a table with a green cloth. Before leaving him the usher had said, ‘This is the judges’ room. The door with the brass knob leads directly into the court-room. Monsieur will find himself behind the judge’s chair.’ The words were mingled in his mind with a vague recollection of passages and stairways along which they had passed.
He was now alone. This was the supreme moment. He strove to collect his thoughts and could not do so. It is precisely in those moments when we have most need to grasp the painful realities of life that our thoughts are most apt to lose their coherence. He was in the room where the judges retired to consult together and decide upon their verdict, and he gazed round it in a kind of apathy, the quiet, ominous room where so many lives had been shattered, where presently his own name would be spoken and his fate decided. He stared at the wall in inward contemplation, amazed that he should be the man standing in that room.
He had eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, he had been shaken by the jolting of the gig, but he felt none of this; he was not conscious of feeling anything.
Hanging on the wall was a framed letter written by Jean-Nicolas Pache, Mayor of Paris under the Revolution and author of the slogan, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death’, in which Pache sent the local Commune a list of former ministers and deputies held under arrest in their homes. From the care with which Madeleine studied this letter, reading it several times, it might have been thought that he found it of particular interest. In fact, he was not aware of reading it; he was thinking about Fantine and the child Cosette.
Turning abstractedly away, his eyes fell on the brass handle of the door leading to the court-room. He had almost forgotten that door. He glanced casually at the handle and then his gaze returned to it, becoming wide and fixed, filled with a kind of terror. Beads of sweat formed on his scalp and rolled down his temples.
With a sudden start, that gesture of mingled authority and rebellion which says so plainly, ‘Who says I must?’, he turned away abruptly, crossed over to the door by which he had entered, opened it and went out. He found himself in a long, narrow passage with flights of steps, doorways, and several turns, lighted here and there by dim lamps like those in a sick-room – the passage along which he had come. He drew breath and stood listening. There was no sound to be heard, ahead of him or behind. He began to run as though he were pursued.
After turning several corners he paused again to listen. The same silence enclosed him, the same darkness. He was out of breath. He staggered and leaned against the stone wall, finding it cold to the touch. The sweat was chilled on his forehead. He shivered and stood upright.
And there, standing in shadow, shivering with cold and perhaps something else, he staye
d considering. He had been thinking all that day and all the previous night. There was nothing left in him except a voice that said, ‘Alas!’
A quarter of an hour passed. At length he bowed his head and sighed in anguish, and with his arms limply hanging, turned back. He walked slowly as though overpowered, as though someone had caught and seized him as he fled.
He re-entered the judges’ room, and the first thing that caught his eye was the polished brass door-handle, shining like a baleful star. He stared at it as a lamb might stare at a beast of prey. He could not take his eyes off it. At intervals he moved a step nearer to the door.
Had he listened he would have heard a confused murmur of voices coming from the adjoining room; but he did not listen, and heard nothing.
Suddenly, and without knowing how it happened, he found himself standing at the door. He seized the handle with a convulsive movement and the door opened.
He was in the court-room.
IX
Place of decision
Closing the door mechanically behind him, he stood observing the scene.
This place, where the meticulous and solemn drama of criminal trial was being enacted in the presence of a crowded audience, was large and dimly lighted, filled at moments with the buzz of voices, and at moments profoundly silent. At the end where he was standing a number of bored-looking magistrates in robes were biting their nails or sitting with closed eyes. At the other end was a crowd of ragged spectators, lawyers in casual attitudes, and soldiers with hard, bold faces. Old and stained wainscoting, a grimy ceiling, tables draped with yellowed green baize, doors blackened with handprints, tavern lamps hanging from nails knocked into the woodwork and candles in brass candlesticks on the tables. Darkness, ugliness, and melancholy, but all pervaded with a sense of lofty austerity, a consciousness of the great human proceeding that we call law and the divine proceeding that is called justice.
No one paid any attention to him. All eyes were directed to a single point, a wooden bench with a small door behind it, set against one wall The bench was lighted by candles and on it a man was seated, flanked by two gendarmes.
This was the man.
Madeleine had no need to seek him out. His eyes went instinctively towards him as though he had known in advance where he would be. And he seemed to be looking at himself grown old, not wholly similar in feature, but with the posture and general aspect, the unkempt hair, the wary, restless eyes, the smock – the man he had been when, with a heart filled with hatred and a mind burdened with the hideous memory of nineteen years’ imprisonment, he had come to Digne.
He thought with a shudder, ‘Oh, God, am I to become that again?’
The man, who was at least sixty and looked dull-witted and furtive, conveyed a general impression of coarseness.
Room had been made for Madeleine when he entered. The presiding judge had looked round, and realizing that this must be the mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer, had bowed his head in greeting. The advocate-general, whose official duties had several times brought him to the town, recognized Monsieur Madeleine and also saluted him. He was scarcely aware of these courtesies. He was staring about him, stupefied.
He had seen all this before, the judges, the clerk, the gendarmes, the crowd of curious, unfeeling faces. He had seen it twenty-seven years ago and now he was seeing it again, no longer a nightmare haunting his memory but the thing itself, gendarmes and judges, the assembly of flesh-and-blood humanity; he was reliving in dreadful truth, all that was most monstrous in his past. The past loomed like a gulf before him, and he closed his eyes in horror, crying in the depths of his soul, ‘Never!’
And by a tragic freak of chance which so confounded his mind that he felt he must be going mad, he saw another man standing in his place, assumed by everyone to be Jean Valjean.
Everything was the same, the paraphernalia of the law, the lateness of the hour – even the faces of judges, gendarmes, and spectators seemed scarcely to have changed. Only one thing was different: a crucifix hung on the wall above the presiding judge’s head, and this had been lacking in court-rooms at the time of his own trial. He had been tried in the absence of God.
There was a chair behind him and he sat down, terrified by the thought that someone might notice him. A pile of documents on the judge’s table hid him from the court when he sat, so that he could observe without being seen. By degrees his wits returned to him and his sense of reality; he became calm enough to listen.
Among the jurymen was M. Bamatabois. Madeleine looked for Javert but could not see him, the witnesses’ bench being hidden from his view by the clerk’s table, and the hall, in any case, being poorly lighted.
He had entered at the moment when the accused man’s advocate was concluding his speech for the defence, amid an attentive silence. The hearing had lasted three hours. For three hours the audience had watched a man, a stranger to the locality, an abject creature who was either profoundly stupid or profoundly cunning, crumble beneath the weight of a terrible probability. What was known of him? The witnesses who had been heard during the preliminary inquiry had been unanimous in their testimony, and other facts had emerged during the trial. The argument of the prosecution was as follows: ‘The accused is not merely a petty thief who has been caught stealing fruit, but a highly dangerous ruffian, an ex-convict who has broken parole, a criminal named Jean Valjean who has long been sought by the law. Directly after being released from imprisonment in Toulon he committed a highway robbery with the use of force on the person of a boy named Petit-Gervais, a crime under Article 383 of the Penal Code for which we reserve the right to prosecute him when his identity has been legally established. He has now committed another theft. It is a case of recidivism. Convict him of this latest crime and he will in due course be tried for the earlier one’ … The extent of the charge, and the unanimity of the witnesses, seemed to cause the accused astonishment more than any other emotion. He made negative gestures, or stared up at the ceiling, expressing himself with difficulty and replying awkwardly to the questions put to him; but his whole attitude was one of denial. He was like a half-wit in the presence of the keen minds arrayed against him, and like a foreigner in this society that had him in its grasp. And the case against him was growing steadily stronger, the likelihood of conviction steadily increasing, so that the spectators seemed more conscious of the fate that threatened him than he was himself. Even the possibility of a death-sentence, if his identity was established and he was convicted of the robbery of Petit-Gervais, could not be ruled out. What manner of man was he? What was the reason for his apparent indifference? Was it due to imbecility or to cunning? Did he understand too much, or nothing at all? These were, the questions that puzzled the spectators and seemed to divide the jury. The affair was at once ugly and mystifying, its drama not just sombre but obscure.
The defending attorney had pleaded, not ineffectively, in that language of the provinces which has long been the eloquence of the court-room, formerly used by all advocates both in Paris and elsewhere, and now the classic mode, rarely heard except on the lips of speakers at the bar, who delight in its impressive sonority and rolling periods. It is a language in which a husband or wife is always a ‘spouse’, Paris ‘the centre of art and civilization’, the king ‘the monarch’, a bishop ‘a saintly pontiff’, a theatre ‘a temple of Melpomene’, a concert ‘a musical occasion’, newspaper errors ‘imposture spreading its venom through the columns of a certain journal’, and so on … Beginning with the theft of the apples, a matter difficult of treatment in lofty terms, the defending attorney argued that this was not conclusively proved. No one had seen his client (whom, as his advocate, he persisted in calling Champmathieu) climb the wall or break a branch off the tree. He had been caught in possession of the branch (which the speaker preferred to call ‘the fruitful bough’) but claimed that he had found it on the ground and picked it up. Where was the evidence to the contrary? Undoubtedly the wall had been climbed and a branch broken off, and no doubt the marauder had flung it
away in panic. Certainly there had been a marauder, but what proof was there that it was Champmathieu? There was simply the fact that Champmathieu was an ex-convict This his defender did not deny, since it appeared to be established. The accused had lived in Faverolles, he had been a tree-pruner, and the name Champmathieu might originally have been Jean Mathieu. All this was true, and moreover four witnesses had positively identified the man Champmathieu with the convict Jean Valjean. The defence had nothing to oppose to this except the man’s own denial. But supposing him to be an ex-convict, did this prove that he had stolen the apples? It was at the best a presumption. Certainly the accused – and the defence must ‘in good faith’ concede as much – had adopted an unfortunate attitude. He had persisted in denying everything, not only the theft of the apples but also the fact that he had a prison record. It would have served him better to give way on the latter point, since the admission would certainly have rendered the court more disposed to lenience. He had been advised of this but had stubbornly refused to accept the advice, no doubt believing that by denying everything he could save everything. It was a grave error, but surely the man’s lack of intelligence must be taken into account. He was clearly stupid. A long term of imprisonment and the vagabond life he had led since his release had further dulled his wits. Was he to be condemned for this? As to the matter of Petit-Gervais, since it did not enter into the present case the defence was not called upon to discuss it. The attorney concluded with a strong plea to the jury and the bench that if they were satisfied that the accused was Jean Valjean, he should be subjected only to the penalties applying to a released convict who has broken parole, not to the terrible chastisement inflicted on a recidivist felon.
The advocate-general then put the case for the prosecution with the florid vehemence that prosecuting attorneys are accustomed to use.
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