بخش 1 کتاب 2

BOOK TWO

THE FALL

I. THE NIGHT AFTER A DAY’S WALK

IN THE FIRST days of the month of October 1815, about an hour before sunset, a man travelling on foot entered the small town of Digne. The few inhabitants who found themselves at their windows or front doors at that moment watched the traveller with a vague anxiety. You would have been hard-pressed to come across anyone on the road more derelict in appearance. He was a man of average height, stocky and strong and in the prime of his life. He might have been around forty-six or forty-eight. A cap with a turned-down leather peak partly hid his face, which was sunburned and windburned and streaming with sweat. His shirt of coarse yellow twill, fastened at the neck with a small silver anchor, gaped open, exposing his hairy chest; he had a cravat that looked like twisted rope, trousers of blue drill, worn out and threadbare, with one knee frayed white and one knee in holes, a tattered old grey peasant’s smock, with one elbow patched with a bit of green sheeting sewn on with string; on his back, a brand-new soldier’s knapsack crammed to bursting and tightly buckled up; in his hand, an enormous knotted stick; on his stockingless feet, hobnailed shoes. His head was shorn and his beard was long.

The sweat, the heat, the journey on foot, the dust, added a strange sordidness to his shabby appearance.

Though his hair had been shaved off it still managed to stick out all over his head, for it was beginning to grow back and looked as though it hadn’t been cut in quite a while.

No one knew who he was. Obviously he was just passing through. Where did he come from? From down south. Maybe from the coast. For he made his entrance into Digne from the same street that, seven months before, had seen the emperor Napoléon go by on his way from Cannes to Paris. The man had to have been walking all day. He looked extremely tired. Women from the old quarter at the bottom of the town had seen him stop under the trees on the boulevard Gassendi and drink from the fountain that stands at one end of the esplanade. He must have been really thirsty because the children trailing after him saw him stop again for a drink two hundred feet farther along at the fountain in the marketplace.

When he got to the corner of the rue Poichevert, he turned left and headed for the mairie.1 He went in, then came out a quarter of an hour later. A gendarme was sitting by the door on the stone bench General Drouot2 had mounted on March 4 to read to the terrified assembled residents of Digne Napoléon’s proclamation3 on his landing in Juan Gulf.4 The man lifted his cap and humbly saluted the gendarme.

Without returning his greeting, the gendarme stared intently at him, watched him closely for a while as he moved off, then went inside the mairie.

In Digne in those days there was a very good inn known as La Croix de Colbas. The innkeeper was a man named Jacquin Labarre and he was held in high esteem in the town because he was related to another Labarre, who kept another inn, the Trois Dauphins in Grenoble and who had served in the Guides. At the time of the emperor’s landing, the Trois Dauphins had been the talk of the region. It was said that General Bertrand, disguised as a carter, had made frequent trips to it during the month of January and that he had handed out croix d’honneur there to the soldiers and fistfuls of napoléons to the good burghers.5 The truth is that once he entered Grenoble, the emperor had refused to move into the prefecture building; he had thanked the mayor for his offer with these words: “I’m going to stay with a fine fellow I happen to know”—and with that, he promptly took himself off to the Trois Dauphins. The glory of this Trois Dauphins Labarre was reflected twenty-five miles away on the Labarre of the Croix de Colbas. They liked to say of him in town: “He’s the cousin of the one in Grenoble.” The man headed for the inn, which was the best in the district. He went into the kitchen, which opened directly onto the street. All the stoves were burning; a great fire blazed merrily in the fireplace. The host, who was also the cook, was going from the hearth to the saucepans, totally engrossed in supervising an excellent dinner destined for some cart drivers who could be heard cackling and yapping away furiously in the next room. If you’ve ever been on the road you know that nobody eats better than cart drivers. A fat marmot, flanked by white partridges and grouse, was turning on a long spit in front of the fire; on the stoves were two huge carp from the lac de Lauzet and a trout from the lac d’Alloz.

The host, hearing the door open and a newcomer enter, said without taking his eyes off his stoves: “What are you after, Monsieur?” “Bed and board,” said the man.

“Nothing easier,” replied the host. At that point he turned his head, gave the traveller a thorough once-over, and added: “—it’ll cost you.” The man pulled a fat leather purse from the pocket of his smock and answered: “I have money.”

“In that case, at your service,” said the host.

The man put his purse back in his pocket, hoisted his pack off his back and dropped it on the floor by the door; then, still holding his stick, he went and sat on a low stepladder by the fire. Digne is in the mountains. Nights in October are cold there.

As the host came and went, he still kept a steady eye on the traveller.

“Will dinner be ready soon?” the man asked.

“Shortly,” said the host.

While the newcomer warmed up with his back turned, the worthy innkeeper Jacquin Labarre took a pencil from his pocket and then tore off a corner from an old newspaper lying on a small table near the window. He scribbled a line or two in the empty margin, folded it without sealing it, and handed the scrap of paper to a boy who appeared to serve him as both kitchen hand and lackey at once. The innkeeper had a word in the boy’s ear and the child skipped off in the direction of the mairie.

The traveller had not seen any of this.

He asked again: “Will dinner be ready soon?”

“Shortly,” said the host.

The boy came back—with the note. The host hurriedly unfolded it as though anxious for an answer. He read it with apparent interest, then shook his head and thought for a moment. Finally he took a step toward the traveller, who looked to be lost in thoughts that were not particularly serene.

“Monsieur,” he said, “I can’t put you up.”

The man half-rose in his seat.

“What! Are you frightened I won’t pay? Do you want me to pay you in advance? I have money, I tell you.” “It’s not that.”

“What then?”

“You have money—”

“Yes,” said the man.

“But I,” said the host, “I don’t have a room.”

The man replied calmly: “Put me in the stable.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“The horses take up all the room.”

“Well then,” the man shot back, “a corner of the hayloft. A bale of straw. We’ll look into it after dinner.” “I can’t give you any dinner.”

This declaration, made in a measured but firm tone, struck the stranger as serious. He got up.

“What the—! But I’m dying of hunger. I’ve been walking since sunrise. I’ve covered twelve leagues.6 I’m paying. I want to eat.” “I haven’t got anything,” said the host.

The man burst out laughing and turned toward the chimney and the stoves.

“You haven’t got anything, eh! What’s all that?”

“All that is taken.”

“Who by?”

“By those gentlemen, the cart drivers.”

“How many of them are there?”

“Twelve.”

“There’s enough there to feed twenty.”

“They reserved all of it and paid for all of it in advance.”

The man sat back down and said, without raising his voice:

“I’m at the inn, I’m starving, and I’m staying put.”

At that, the host bent down to his ear and said to him in a tone that made him jump: “Get out of here.” The traveller was bent over at that point, poking a few embers in the fire with the metal tip of his stick; he wheeled round and, as he was opening his mouth to reply, the host fixed him with his eye and added, again in a low voice: “Listen, enough talk. Do you want me to tell you who you are? You are Jean Valjean.7 Now would you like me to tell you what you are? When I saw you come in, I was suspicious, I sent word to the mairie and here’s what they sent back. Can you read?” So saying, he handed the stranger the note, now unfolded, that had just made the trip from the inn to the mairie and from the mairie back to the inn. The man glanced at it. The innkeeper continued after a moment’s silence: “I’m in the habit of being polite to everyone. Get out of here.”

The man dipped his head, picked up his bag, and left.

He took the main street. He walked willy-nilly, putting one foot in front of the other, slinking alongside the houses with his tail between his legs, humiliated and sad. He did not look back once. If he had looked back, he would have seen the innkeeper of La Croix de Colbas on his doorstep, surrounded by all the travellers at the inn and all the pedestrians in the street, talking animatedly and pointing at him, and seeing the looks of suspicion and fear on their faces, he would have guessed that before too long his arrival would be the talk of the town.

He saw nothing of all this: People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back. They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake.

He walked along for a while without stopping, aimlessly tramping down whatever unknown streets cropped up, forgetting his fatigue, as can happen in a bout of sadness. All of a sudden he felt a real pang of hunger. Night was falling. He looked around to see if he could see any kind of lodging.

The fine hotel trade was closed to him, so he looked for a humble tavern, any sleazy dive.

Just then a light came on at the end of the street; a pine branch, hanging from an iron stand, stood out against the white sky of twilight. He headed straight for it.

It was in fact a tavern, the one in the rue de Chauffaut.

The traveller stopped in his tracks for a moment and gazed through the windowpane into the low-ceilinged tavern, which was lit by a small lamp on a table and by a great fire in the fireplace. A few men were inside drinking. The host was warming himself by the fire. The flames were causing an iron pot hanging on a hook to hiss.

You can enter this tavern, which is also an inn of sorts, by one of two doors. One door opens onto the street, the other leads to a small courtyard full of dung. The traveller did not dare take the street entrance. He slipped into the courtyard, stopped again, and then gingerly lifted the latch and pushed the door.

“Who goes there?” asked the publican.

“Someone who’d like a meal and a bed.”

“That’s good, because in this house we eat and we sleep.”

He went in. All the drinkers turned to look at him. The lamp shone on him from one side, the fire from the other. They examined him for a while as he was taking off his pack.

The host said to him: “There’s the fire. Supper’s in the pot. Come and warm yourself, friend.”

He went and sat close to the fireplace and stretched his aching feet out in front of the fire. A delicious smell was wafting from the pot. All that could be seen of his face beneath the lowered cap took on a vague look of well-being mingled with that other, very poignant look that the habit of suffering produces.

His was, besides, a strong face, energetic and sad. He had the strangest physiognomy, which started off looking humble and ended up looking harsh. His eyes were shining under his eyebrows like fire under scrub.

But one of the men at the table was a fisherman who, before coming into the tavern in the rue de Chauffaut, had stopped to put his horse in the stable at Labarre’s. Chance would have it that he had come across the stranger that very morning as he made his way between Bras d’Asse and—well, … I forget the name. I think it was Escoublon. Now, when he had come across him, the man, who already seemed exhausted, had asked him to give him a ride on the back; to which the fisherman had replied only by doubling his pace. This fisherman had been part of the group gathered around Jacquin Labarre only half an hour before and he had himself related his unpleasant encounter of the morning to his mates at La Croix de Colbas. He subtly motioned to the taverner from his seat. The taverner went over to him. They exchanged a few words softly. The man had sunk into his thoughts once more.

The taverner went back to the fireside, clapped his hand roughly on the man’s shoulder, and said: “On your way!” The stranger turned to face him and replied mildly: “Ah! So you know?”

“Too right I know.”

“They turned me away from the other inn.”

“And we’re kicking you out of this one.”

“Where am I supposed to go?”

“Somewhere else.”

The man took his stick and his bag and left.

As he was leaving, some children who had followed him from La Croix de Colbas and who seemed to be waiting for him began throwing stones at him. He retraced his steps furiously and threatened them with his stick; the children scattered like a flock of birds.

He came to the prison. An iron chain attached to a bell hung from the prison door. He rang.

A grate slid open.

“Doorkeeper,” he said, respectfully taking off his cap, “would you kindly open up for me and let me stay here for tonight?” A voice replied: “This is a prison, not an inn. Get yourself arrested. Then we’ll open up for you.”

And the grate closed again.

He turned into a little street where there were a lot of gardens. Some were enclosed by hedges, which cheered up the street. Among these gardens and these hedges, he saw a little single-storey house with a light in the window. He peered through the glass as he had done at the tavern. It was a large whitewashed room with a bed draped in Indian cotton and a cradle in a corner, a few wooden chairs, and a double-barrelled musket hanging on the wall. A table was set in the middle of the room. A brass lamp lit a tablecloth of coarse white cotton, a pewter pitcher that gleamed like silver, and a smoking brown soup tureen. At this table was seated a man in his forties, with an exuberant, open face, bouncing a toddler on his knees. Next to him a very young woman was breast-feeding another baby. The father was laughing, the toddler was laughing, the mother was smiling.

The stranger was momentarily spellbound before this sweet and soothing scene. What was going through his mind? Only he could have said. Most likely he was thinking that such a joyful home would be hospitable and that there, where he saw so much happiness, he would perhaps find a bit of pity.

He knocked ever so faintly on the window.

No one heard.

He knocked again.

He heard the woman say to her husband: “I think I heard someone knock.”

“No,” said the husband.

He knocked for the third time.

The husband got up, took the lamp, and went and opened the door.

He was a tall man, half peasant, half artisan. He was wearing a vast leather apron that fastened over his left shoulder, with a pouch for a hammer, a red handkerchief, a powder horn, all kinds of objects held in place by his belt as though they were in a pocket. He threw his head back; his shirt, which was collarless and largely open, showed his bull neck, white and bare. He had thick bushy eyebrows, enormous black side-whiskers, bulging eyes, a muzzle of a chin, and over it all that indefinable air of being right at home.

“Forgive me, Monsieur,” said the traveller. “If I pay you, could you give me a bowl of soup and a corner to sleep in in that shed down there in the garden? Tell me, could you? If I pay?” “Who are you?” asked the man of the house.

The man replied: “I’ve come from Puy-Moisson. I’ve been walking all day. I’ve done twelve leagues. Could you? If I pay?” “I wouldn’t refuse to put up any decent man who could pay. But why don’t you go to the inn?”

“There’s no room.”

“Gah! That’s not possible. There’s no fair on today and it isn’t market day. Did you try Labarre’s?”

“Yes.”

“Well then?”

The traveller replied in some embarrassment: “I don’t know, he wouldn’t let me stay.”

“Did you go to the other joint, rue de Chauffaut?”

The stranger’s embarrassment increased. He stammered: “He wouldn’t let me stay either.”

The peasant’s face took on a suspicious expression; he looked the newcomer over from head to toe and suddenly he bellowed with a sort of shudder: “Are you the man …?” Casting another glance at the stranger, he took three steps back, put the lamp down on the table and took the gun off the wall.

But the wife had leaped up at the peasant’s words: “Are you the man …?”; she had swept her two children into her arms and swiftly taken refuge behind her husband, gazing at the stranger in horror, her throat bare, her eyes wild with fright, murmuring almost inaudibly in French alpine patois: “Tso-maraude”—chat de maraude, or cat of a thief.

All this happened faster than you could have imagined. After studying “the man” for a moment, the way you would study a viper, the man of the house came back to the door and said: “On your way.” “For pity’s sake,” the man cried, “a glass of water.”

“I’ll give you a bullet!” said the peasant.

With that he banged the door shut violently and the man could hear two heavy bolts shooting home. A moment later, the shutter closed over the window, and the sound of an iron bar being put in place reverberated outside.

Night kept on falling. The cold wind from off the Alps came up. By the dying light of day, the stranger spotted in one of the gardens lining the street a sort of hut that looked as though it were built out of clumps of turf. He resolutely hurdled a wooden fence and found himself in the garden. He approached the hut; for a door it had a very low and narrow opening, and it looked like one of those buildings that road menders throw up by the side of the road. No doubt he thought that was what it was, a road mender’s shed; he was suffering from cold and hunger—he had resigned himself to the hunger, but at least here was shelter from the cold. These sorts of sheds are usually empty at night. He lay down on his stomach and slid into the hut. It was warm inside and he found quite a decent bed of straw. He lay resting for a moment stretched on the bed, unable to move a muscle he was so tired. Then, as the bag on his back was uncomfortable and it would make a good pillow, he started to unbuckle one of the straps. At that moment a ferocious growl could be heard. He looked up. The head of an enormous mastiff was outlined against the hut’s entrance.

It was a dog kennel.

He was himself vigorous and formidable; he grabbed his stick as a weapon, used his bag as a shield, and got out of the hut as best he could, not without making the rips in his tattered clothes much worse.

He also made his way out of the garden, walking backward, obliged, to keep the dog’s respect, to resort to that manoeuvre with the stick that masters of this style of fencing call la rose couverte.

When he had scrambled back over the fence, not without difficulty, and he found himself once again on the street, alone, without a place to stay, without a roof over his head, without shelter, driven even from a straw bed in a miserable dog kennel, he sank down rather than sat on a rock, and it appears that someone going past heard him cry out: “I’m not even a dog!” Soon he got back to his feet and began walking again. He left the town behind, hoping to find a tree or a haystack somewhere in a field where he could take shelter.

He ambled along for some time with his head hung low. When he felt he was far away from all human habitation, he raised his eyes and looked around him. He was in a field; in front of him was one of those low hills covered in very short stubble that, after the harvest, look like shaved heads.

The horizon was pitch black, due not only to the thickness of night but also to very low-lying clouds that seemed to press down on the hill itself and then to rise, filling the whole sky. But as the moon was about to come up and a last faint crepuscular light hovered at the zenith, the clouds formed a sort of vault of whitish light at the highest point of the sky, from which a shaft of light fell to earth.

This made the ground lighter than the sky, which is a particularly sinister effect, and the hill, with its meagre and stunted contour, stood out pale and wan against the shadowy horizon. The whole scene was hideously bleak, mean, gloomy, hemmed in. Nothing in the field or on the hill, apart from a gnarled tree that seemed to twist and rustle just a few feet from the traveller.

This man was obviously far from possessing the ingrained subtlety of intelligence and sensitivity that makes you susceptible to the mysterious appearances of things; and yet there was in that sky, in that hill, in that plain, and in that tree something so profoundly desolate that after standing there motionless for a moment and musing, he swiftly turned back the way he came. There are times when nature itself strikes you as hostile.

He retraced his steps. The gates of Digne were closed. In 1815, Digne, which had sustained sieges in the wars of religion,8 was still surrounded by ancient walls flanked by square towers that have since been demolished. He slipped through a breach and was back inside the town.

It might have been eight o’clock at night. Since he did not know the streets, he struck out again at random.

And so he came to the prefecture, followed by the seminary. As he passed by the cathedral square, he shook his fist at the church.

In a corner of the square there is a printing works. This is where the proclamations of the emperor and the Imperial Guard to the army, dictated by Napoléon himself and brought back from the island of Elba, were printed for the first time.

Exhausted and past caring, he lay down on the stone bench that sits at the door of the printing works.

An old woman emerged from the church at that moment. She saw the man lying there stretched out in the dark.

“What are you doing there, my friend?” she said.

His reply was sharp and angry: “As you can see, my good woman, I’m trying to sleep.”

The good woman, most worthy of the name in fact, was Madame la marquise de R——.

“On that bench?” she continued.

“For nineteen years I’ve had wood for a mattress,” said the man. “Today I have a mattress of stone.”

“Were you a soldier?”

“Yes, my good woman. A soldier.”

“Why don’t you go to the inn?”

“Because I don’t have any money.”

“Alas,” said Madame de R——, “I’ve only got four sous9 in my purse.”

“Give them to me anyway.”

The man took the four sous. Madame de R—— went on: “You can’t get yourself a room in an inn with that paltry sum. Have you tried, though? You can’t possibly spend the night out here. I bet you’re cold and hungry. Someone could have put you up out of charity.” “I knocked on every door.”

“What happened?”

“Everyone drove me away.”

The good woman put her hand on the man’s arm and pointed out a small low house next to the bishop’s palace on the opposite side of the square.

“You knocked,” she asked, “on every door?”

“Yes.”

“Did you knock on that one?”

“No.”

“Knock there.”

II. PRUDENCE IS RECOMMENDED TO WISDOM

THAT EVENING, THE bishop of Digne had stayed shut up in his room after his stroll around town. He was busy with his great work on Duty1 which, unfortunately, has remained unfinished. He was carefully going through all that the Fathers and Doctors2 have said on this grave subject. His book was divided into two parts. First, the duties of all; second, the duties of each one according to his station in life. The duties of all are the major duties. There are four categories of them. Saint Matthew has listed them as: duties to God (Matthew 6); duties to ourselves (Matthew 5:29–30); duties to our neighbour (Matthew 7:12); and duties to all God’s creatures (Matthew 6:20, 25). As for other duties, the bishop found them listed and prescribed in other places; those of sovereigns and subjects in the Epistle to the Romans; those of magistrates, wives, mothers, and young men by Saint Peter; those of husbands, children, and servants in the Epistle to the Ephesians; those of the faithful in the Epistle to the Hebrews; and those of virgins in the Epistle to the Corinthians. He was committed to the laborious task of bringing all these prescriptions together into one harmonious whole that he hoped to offer up for the souls of mankind.

He was still toiling away at eight o’clock, writing inconveniently enough on little squares of paper with a great big book open on his knees, when Madame Magloire came in, as was her wont, to take the silverware out of the cupboard by the bed. A moment later, the bishop sensed that the table was set and that his sister was perhaps waiting for him, so he closed his book, got up from his table, and went into the dining room.

The dining room was a long room with a fireplace and with a door that opened on to the street, as we said, and a window that opened onto the garden.

Madame Magloire was indeed just finishing laying the table. While going about her business, she was chatting with Mademoiselle Baptistine.

A lamp was sitting on the table and the table was near the fireplace. A pretty good fire had been lit.

You can easily imagine these two women, who were both over sixty now: Madame Magloire, small, fat, lively; Mademoiselle Baptistine, sweet, thin, frail, a bit taller than her brother, dressed in a puce-coloured frock, a colour in vogue in 1806 when she had bought it in Paris, and which was holding up well. To borrow one of those vulgar phrases that have the merit of expressing in a single word ideas that can scarcely be expressed in a page, Madame Magloire had the look of a peasant and Mademoiselle Baptistine of a lady. Madame Magloire was wearing a banded white bonnet, a little gold chain with a cross known as a jeannette around her neck, the only article of women’s jewellery in the house, a bright white shawl known as a fichu peeking out of a homespun black dress with short wide sleeves, a red and green checked cotton apron, tied at the waist with a green ribbon, with a similar bodice piece, a stomacher, pinned up at the top at both corners; on her feet she wore clunky shoes and yellow stockings like the women of Marseilles. Mademoiselle Baptistine’s dress was cut along the lines of 1806 models, with a short waist, narrow skirt, sleeves with padded shoulders, and with plackets and buttons. She hid her grey hair under a curly wig in the style known as à l’enfant. Madame Magloire looked intelligent, sharp, and good; the corners of her mouth were crooked when she smiled and her top lip was fatter than her bottom lip, which made her look somewhat obdurate and imperious. While Monseigneur remained silent, she hammered at him relentlessly with a mixture of familiarity and respect; but as soon as he opened his mouth, as we’ve seen, she became as meekly docile as Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle Baptistine did not even speak. She simply knuckled under, quietly complying. Even when young she had not been pretty. She had big blue eyes bulging out of her head and a long hooked beak. But her whole face, her whole person, as we said at the beginning, exuded ineffable goodness. She had been predestined to generous indulgence; but faith, hope, and charity, those three virtues that gently warm the soul, had gradually elevated this indulgence to saintliness. Nature had made her a mere sheep; religion had made her an angel. Poor saintly spinster! Sweet memory now vanished!

Mademoiselle Baptistine told what happened at the bishop’s place that night so many times afterwards that there are still people living who remember it down to the last detail.

When the bishop came in, Madame Magloire was talking somewhat animatedly, discoursing with Mademoiselle on a familiar subject to which the bishop was long accustomed. This concerned the latch on the front door.

It seems that while Madame Magloire was out shopping for supper, she had picked up a few things in various places. There was talk of a bad-looking prowler; of how a dubious-looking tramp had popped up out of nowhere and was lurking in town somewhere and how you wouldn’t want to run into him in a dark alley if you were foolish enough to come home late that night. How the police were totally useless, to boot, given that the prefect of police and the mayor hated each other and tried to do each other harm by staging incidents to show the other up. How it was accordingly up to sensible people to be their own police and to protect themselves and to make doubly sure that their houses were duly shuttered, bolted, and barricaded and to make doubly sure the doors were securely locked.

Madame Magloire stressed those last words; but the bishop had just come from his room where he had been rather cold, so he went and sat in front of the fire to warm up and then started thinking about something else. He didn’t hear a word of what Madame Magloire had let slip. She repeated it. Then, Mademoiselle Baptistine, wanting to satisfy Madame Magloire without annoying her brother, timidly ventured to say: “My dear brother, did you hear what Madame Magloire was saying?”

“I heard something vaguely,” he replied.

Then he turned his chair half round and put his hands on his knees, and raising his friendly, good-humoured face, lit from below by the fire, to his old servant, he said: “Come on, what is it? What is it? Are we in mortal danger, then?”

So Madame Magloire told her story all over again, unwittingly exaggerating here and there. It appeared that some bohemian, some barefoot gypsy, a dangerous beggar of a man was in town at that actual moment. He had turned up for bed and board at Jacquin Labarre’s but Labarre had refused to take him in. He’d been seen arriving by the boulevard Gassendi and prowling about the streets at dusk. A man with a pack and a rope and a terrible face.

“You don’t say?” said the bishop.

This willingness to question her encouraged Madame Magloire; it seemed to her to indicate that the bishop was not far from being alarmed himself and so she went on, triumphantly: “Yes, Monseigneur, that’s the size of it. Something awful will happen in town tonight. Everybody says so. Add to that, the police are less than useless [a useful repetition]. Fancy living in the mountains and not even having streetlamps! You go out. It’s black as the ace of spades, for heaven’s sake! So I say, Monseigneur, and Mademoiselle also says—” “Me?” the sister interrupted. “I say nothing. Whatever my brother does is the right thing to do.”

Madame Magloire continued as though she had not heard this protest.

“We both say that this house is not a bit safe; that, if Monseigneur will let me, I’ll go and tell Paulin Musebois, the locksmith, to come and put the old locks back on the door; they’re just over there, it’ll only take a minute. And I say we must have locks, Monseigneur, if only for tonight; you see, I say that a door that opens from outside with just a latch that anyone can open, well, nothing could be more dreadful. Add to that the fact that Monseigneur is in the habit of always telling people to come in—even in the middle of the night. Heaven help us! They don’t even need to ask permission—” At that very moment, a loud knock was heard at the door.

“Come in,” said the bishop.

III. THE HEROISM OF PASSIVE OBEDIENCE

THE DOOR OPENED.

It opened suddenly, wide, as though someone had given it a vigorous and determined shove.

A man entered.

We know this man already. It was the traveller we saw a moment ago wandering around in search of a place to stay.

He came in, took a step, then stopped, leaving the door open behind him. He had his bag over his shoulder, his stick in his hand, and a rugged, reckless, tired, and violent look in his eyes. The fire in the grate shone on him. He was awful. It was a sinister apparition.

Madame Magloire did not even have the strength to utter a cry. She stood trembling with her mouth hanging open.

Mademoiselle Baptistine turned round, saw the man come in, and half-rose with shock, then, slowly turning her head back to the fireplace, she took a good look at her brother and her face became once more profoundly calm and serene.

The bishop fixed a tranquil eye on the man.

He was about to open his mouth, no doubt to ask the newcomer what he wanted, when the man leaned on his stick with both hands and let his eyes wander over the old man and each of the two women in turn and, without waiting for the bishop to speak, said in a loud voice: “All right. My name is Jean Valjean. I’m a convict. I’ve spent nineteen years in the clink. I’ve been free for four days and I’m on my way to Pontarlier, which is where I’m aiming. Four days I’ve been walking since Toulon.1 Today, I’ve done twelve leagues on foot. This evening, when I got to this place, I went to an inn and I was sent packing because of my yellow passport,2 which I showed them at the mairie. I had to do that. I went to another inn. They said to me: Get lost! At the first place, at the other place. No one would have me. I went to the jail, the doorkeeper wouldn’t open. I was in a dog kennel. The dog bit me and chased me away like it was a man. You’d have thought it knew who I was. I went into the fields to sleep under the stars. There were no stars. I reckoned it was going to rain and that there was no good Lord to stop it from raining, so I came back to town to try and find a doorway. Here, in the square, I was about to lie down on a stone. A good old biddy showed me your house and told me: Knock there. I knocked. What is this place? Are you an inn? I’ve got money, my life savings. One hundred and nine francs fifteen sous that I earned in the clink working for nineteen years. I’ll pay. What do I care? I’ve got money. I’m very tired, twelve leagues on foot, I’m very hungry. Is it all right with you if I stay?” “Madame Magloire,” said the bishop, “set one more place.”

The man took three steps and went over to the lamp that was on the table.

“Listen,” he continued, as if he had not quite understood, “it’s not like that. Didn’t you hear me? I’m a galley slave. A convict. I come from the galleys.” He pulled out of his pocket a large sheet of yellow paper, which he unfolded.

“Here’s my passport. Yellow, as you can see for yourself. This serves to get me kicked out everywhere I go. Would you like to read it? I can read, you know. I learned in the clink. There’s a school for anyone who wants to learn. Look, here’s what they put on the passport: ‘Jean Valjean, freed convict, a native of’—you don’t need that bit—’has spent nineteen years in jail. Five years for breaking and entering. Fourteen years for trying to escape four times. This man is extremely dangerous.’ There! Everybody’s kicked me out. Would you put me up? Is this an inn? Would you give me something to eat and a place to sleep? Do you have a stable?” “Madame Magloire,” said the bishop, “put clean sheets on the bed in the alcove.”

We have already explained the absolute nature of both women’s obedience.

Madame Magloire went out to carry out her orders.

The bishop turned to the man.

“Monsieur,” he said, “sit down and get warm. We’ll have supper shortly and your bed will be made up while you’re eating.” At that, the man finally understood. The expression on his face, till then glum and hard, shifted from stupefaction to doubt, then to joy, and finally became extraordinary. He started to stammer like a madman: “True? You mean it! You mean you’ll keep me? You’re not chasing me away? A convict! And you call me monsieur! You don’t talk down to me! Get lost, you cur! everybody else always says. I really thought you’d send me packing. So I told you straight out who I was. Oh, that fine woman who sent me here! I’m going to have supper! And a bed! A bed with a mattress and sheets! Like everyone else! I haven’t slept in a bed for nineteen years! You really don’t want me to go! You are wonderful people! Anyhow, I’ve got the money. I’ll pay well. Pardon me, Monsieur innkeeper, what’s your name? I’ll pay all you want. You’re a good man. You are an innkeeper, aren’t you?” “I,” said the bishop, “am a priest and I live here.”

“A priest!” the man went on. “Oh! A priest and a good man! Does that mean you don’t want money from me? You’d be the curé, isn’t that right? The curé of that big church? Right, of course! I’m such an idiot! I didn’t see your skullcap!” While he was speaking, he had put his sack and his stick down in a corner, put his passport back in his pocket, and sat down. Mademoiselle Baptistine was studying him sweetly. He continued: “You are humane, Monsieur curé. You don’t have contempt. A good priest really is a good thing. So you don’t need me to pay?” “No,” said the bishop. “Hold on to your money. How much do you have? Didn’t you tell me a hundred and nine francs?” “Fifteen sous,” the man added.

“A hundred and nine francs fifteen sous. And how long did it take you to earn that?”

“Nineteen years.”

“Nineteen years!”

The bishop let out a deep sigh.

The man went on: “I’ve still got all my money. In four days, I’ve only spent the twenty-five sous I earned helping unload carts in Grasse. Since you’re an abbé, I’ll tell you, we had a chaplain in jail. And then one day I saw a bishop. Monseigneur, he was called. It was the bishop of the Majore, in Marseilles.3 He’s the curé who’s above the other curés. You know, sorry, I’m not saying that right, but you know, for me, it’s all so far away!—you know what we’re like, us lot! He said mass in the middle of the jail, at an altar; he had a pointed thing, gold, on his head.4 In the heat of the day, it shone like blazes. We were in rows, on three sides, with the cannons, their wicks lit, facing us. We couldn’t see too well. He said something but he was too far back, we couldn’t hear. So that’s a bishop for you.” While he was speaking, the bishop had gone to shut the door, which had remained wide open.

Madame Magloire returned. She was carrying a plate, which she placed on the table.

“Madame Magloire,” said the bishop, “put that plate as close to the fire as possible.” And then, turning to his guest: “The night wind is bitterly cold in the Alps. You must be cold, Monsieur?” Every time he said that word monsieur in his gently grave yet so very companionable voice, the man’s face lit up. Monsieur to a convict is a glass of water to a man shipwrecked on the Medusa.5 Ignominy is thirsty for respect.

“Now here’s a lamp,” the bishop went on, “that does not give much light.”

Madame Magloire understood and immediately went and fetched the two silver candlesticks from the mantelpiece in Monseigneur’s bedroom and placed them on the table with the candles lit.

“Monsieur curé,” said the man, “you are goodness itself. You don’t despise me. You take me into your home. You light your candles for me. Even though I didn’t hide from you where I’ve been or the fact that I’m a poor cursed man.” The bishop was sitting next to him and he gently touched his hand. “You didn’t have to tell me who you were. This is not my house, it’s the house of Jesus Christ. That door does not ask who enters whether he has a name, but whether he has any pain. You are suffering, you are hungry and thirsty; you are welcome. And don’t thank me, don’t tell me I’m taking you into my home. No one is at home here except the man who is in need of a refuge. I’m telling you, who are passing through, you are more at home here than I am myself. Everything here is at your disposal. What do I need to know your name for? Besides, before you told me your name, you had one I knew.” The man opened his eyes in amazement.

“True? You knew what I was called?”

“Yes,” replied the bishop. “You are called my brother.”

“Listen, father!” cried the man. “I was as hungry as a wolf before I came here; but you are so good, that, now, I don’t know what’s hit me; it’s gone.” The bishop looked at him and said:

“You have suffered a lot?”

“Oh! The red paletot,6 the ball-and-chain at your feet, a plank to sleep on, the heat, the cold, hard labour, the galleys, the stick! Double shackles for nothing. The dungeon for a word. Even sick in bed, the chain. Dogs, dogs are better off! Nineteen years! I’m forty-six. And now I’ve got a yellow passport! There.” “Yes,” the bishop said, “you have come from a place of sadness. Listen. There will be more joy in heaven over the tearful face of a repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred righteous men. If you come out of such a painful place full of hate and rage against men, you are worthy of pity; if you come out full of goodwill, gentleness, and peace, you are worth more than any of us.” Meanwhile Madame Magloire had served supper. A supper composed of water, oil, bread and salt, a bit of bacon, a chunk of mutton, figs, a fromage frais, and a large loaf of rye bread. She had taken it upon herself to add to the bishop’s normal meal a bottle of old wine from Mauves.

The bishop’s face immediately took on that expression of gaiety peculiar to hospitable natures: “Let’s eat!” he said brightly. As he was accustomed to doing whenever a stranger dined with him, he sat the man on his right. Mademoiselle Baptistine, perfectly peaceful and natural, took her place at his left.

The bishop said grace, then himself served the soup as was his wont. The man began to gulp it down.

Suddenly the bishop said: “But it seems to me there’s something missing from the table.”

Madame Magloire had, in fact, only laid out the three place settings strictly necessary. Well, it was the custom of the house that when the bishop had someone to supper, the complete set of six silver place settings were laid out on the tablecloth in an innocent display. This gracious semblance of luxury was a kind of childish game all the more lovable in this sweet austere household that turned poverty into an art of great dignity.

Madame Magloire knew exactly what he was getting at, turned on her heel without a word, and a moment later the three extra place settings required by the bishop were gleaming on the tablecloth, symmetrically arranged in front of each of the three guests.

IV. THE CHEESEMAKERS OF PONTARLIER

NOW, TO GIVE you an idea of what happened at the table, we can’t think of anything better than transcribing a letter from Mademoiselle Baptistine to Madame de Boischevron in which the conversation of the convict and the bishop is narrated with guileless meticulousness.

… The man paid no attention to anyone. He ate voraciously, as if he were starving. But after the soup, he said: “Monsieur le curé of the good Lord, all this is still far too good for me, but I must tell you the cart drivers who didn’t want me to eat with them live better than you do.” Just between us, the remark shocked me a little. My brother replied: “They are a lot tireder than I am.” “No,” the man went on, “they have more money. You are poor. I can see that pretty clearly. Maybe you’re not even a curé? Are you a curé, even? Ah, for crying out loud, if the good Lord was just, you’d be a curé for sure.” “The good Lord is more than just,” my brother said.

A moment later he added: “Monsieur Jean Valjean, is it Pontarlier you are going to?”

“The itinerary is compulsory.”

I’m fairly sure that’s what the man said. Then he went on: “I have to be on the road tomorrow at the crack of dawn. Travel’s hard. The nights may be cold but the days are hot.” “Where you are going,” my brother said, “is fine country. In the Revolution, my family was ruined. I took refuge in Franche-Comté to start with and I lived there for a time by labouring with my bare hands. I was willing and able. I found plenty to occupy myself. There’s plenty to choose from. There are paper mills, tanneries, distilleries, big clock factories, steel mills, copper foundries, at least twenty iron foundries—four of them at Lods, Châtillon, Audincourt, and Beure are very big concerns—” I think I’m not mistaken and that those are the names my brother mentioned. He then stopped and turned to me: “My dear sister, don’t we have relatives around there somewhere?” I answered: “We did have; among others Monsieur de Lucenet, who was captain of the old city gates at Pontarlier under the ancien régime.” “Yes,” my brother went on, “but in ‘93 no one had relatives anymore, we only had our bare hands. I laboured. What they have in the countryside around Pontarlier, where you are going, Monsieur Valjean, is an industry that’s completely family-run and absolutely delightful, my dear sister. I’m talking about their cheese dairies, which they call fruitières.” So then my brother, all the while getting the man to eat more, explained to him in great detail what these Pontarlier fruitières were, how they were divided into two types: the big barns, which are for the rich, and where there are forty or fifty cows that produce seven or eight thousand cheeses a summer; and the fruitières d’association or associated dairies, which are for the poor; these are the peasants of the mid-mountain area who pool their cows and share the produce. They hire a cheesemaker that they call a grurin. The grurin is brought the associates’ milk three times a day and he notes the quantities in duplicate. Toward the end of April the work in the dairies begins and toward mid-June the cheesemakers take their cows up into the mountains.

The man picked up again as he ate. My brother gave him some of the good Mauves wine that he doesn’t drink himself because he says it’s too dear. My brother gave him all these details with that easygoing cheeriness you’ve seen in him, stopping now and then to graciously make a fuss of me. He kept coming back all the time to the job of being a grurin, as though he were hoping that the man realized, without giving him hard advice directly, that this would be a refuge for him. One thing struck me. The man was what I told you he was. Well! During the meal and throughout the evening, my brother did not once say anything, apart from a few words about Jesus when he first arrived, that would remind the man who he was or reveal to the man who my brother was. On the surface, it was a perfect occasion to get in a bit of a sermon and for the bishop to lean on the galley slave in order to give him something to think about. Anyone else, if he had had this poor unfortunate in his hands, might have seen it as an opportunity to feed the man’s soul at the same time as his body and to deliver a reprimand seasoned with morality and advice, or else a touch of commiseration with the exhortation to behave himself better in future. My brother did not even ask him what part of the country he was from or about his history. For in his history lies his crime and my brother seemed to avoid anything that might remind him of that. It got to the point at a certain moment, while my brother was talking about the mountain folk of Pontarlier who have “sweet work close to the heavens” and who, he added, “are happy because they are innocent,” where he stopped short, fearing that in that word that had escaped his lips there was something that could rub the man the wrong way. Having thought about it quite a bit, I think I know what was going through my brother’s mind. He no doubt thought that this man, whose name is Jean Valjean, was only too well aware of his misery, that the best thing to do was to distract him from it and to make him believe, if only for a moment, that he was a man like any other, by being perfectly normal with him. Indeed, isn’t that what charity is, properly called? Isn’t there, my good madame, something truly evangelical in the sort of delicacy that abstains from sermons, moral lessons, allusions, and isn’t the highest form of pity, when a man has a sore spot, not to touch it at all? It seemed to me that this might well have been what my brother was thinking in his heart of hearts. In any case, what I can say is that, if he did have all these ideas, he didn’t let on for a moment, not even to me. From start to finish, he was the same as he always is, every night, and he dined with this Jean Valjean the same way and acted just the same as if he were dining with Monsieur Gédéon Le Prévost or with the parish priest.

Toward the end, as we were up to the figs, someone banged on the door. It was mother Gerbaud with her little one in her arms. My brother kissed the child on the forehead and borrowed fifteen sous I had on me to give to mother Gerbaud. While this was going on the man didn’t pay much attention. He had stopped talking and looked extremely tired. Once poor old mother Gerbaud had gone, my brother gave thanks for the meal and then turned to the man and said to him: “You must be in great need of your bed.” Madame Magloire swiftly removed his plate and I realized we were supposed to retire and let the traveller get some sleep, so we both went upstairs, but I sent Madame Magloire back down an instant later with a deerskin from the Black Forest that is in my room to put on the man’s bed. The nights are icy cold and it keeps you warm. It’s a pity the skin is old; it is losing all its hair. My brother bought it in the days when he was in Germany, at Tottlingen, near the source of the Danube, along with the little ivory-handled knife I use at table.

Madame Magloire came back up almost immediately, we set to praying to God in the room where we hang the washing, and then we each went to our rooms without a word.

V. TRANQUILLITY

AFTER SAYING GOOD night to his sister, Monseigneur Bienvenu took one of the silver candlesticks from the table, handed the other to his guest, and said to him: “Monsieur, I’ll show you to your room.” The man followed him.

As you may have gathered from what was said earlier, the abode was so laid out that, to get into the oratory where the alcove was and to go out of it, you had to go through the bishop’s bedroom.

Just as they were crossing this room, Madame Magloire was locking the silver in the cupboard at the head of the bed. It was the last chore she completed each night before retiring.

The bishop set his guest up in the alcove. A bed with fresh white sheets had been made up. The man placed the candlestick on a small table.

“Well, then,” said the bishop, “have a good night. Tomorrow morning before you leave you will have a cup of milk from our cows, nice and hot.” “Thank you, Monsieur abbé,” said the man.

Scarcely had he said those words full of peace than suddenly and without any transition, he made a strange movement that would have chilled the two saintly women to the bone with horror if they had witnessed it. Even now it is hard for us to grasp what was driving him at that moment. Was he trying to issue a warning or to launch a threat? Was he simply obeying some sort of instinctive impulse obscure even to himself? He suddenly turned to the old man, folded his arms, and fixing his host with a savage glare, cried out in a hoarse voice: “Hah! I don’t believe it! You’re putting me up at your place, right next to you, just like that!” He broke off and added with a laugh that held something monstrous: “Have you really thought about this? Who’s to say I’m not a murderer?” The bishop raised his eyes to the ceiling and answered: “That is the good Lord’s concern.”

Then, gravely, and moving his lips as though he were praying or talking to himself, he raised the two fingers of his right hand and blessed the man, who did not bow his head, and without turning his head and without looking back, he went back to his bedroom.

Whenever there was someone staying in the alcove, a big heavy serge curtain was drawn from one side of the oratory to the other, and it hid the altar. The bishop knelt before this curtain in passing and said a short prayer.

A moment later, he was in his garden, strolling, dreaming, contemplating, heart and soul wholly occupied with the great mysteries that God reveals at night to those whose eyes remain open.

As for the man, he really was so tired that he did not even enjoy the nice white sheets. He had blown out the candle by snorting through one nostril the way convicts do and dropped onto the bed fully clothed, and in an instant he was fast asleep.

Midnight rang out as the bishop left the garden and went back into his apartment.

A few minutes later everyone in the little house was sound asleep.

VI. JEAN VALJEAN

IN THE MIDDLE of the night, Jean Valjean woke up.

Jean Valjean was from a poor peasant family from Brie.1 As a child he had not learned to read. When he reached adulthood, he became a tree pruner in Faverolles. His mother’s name was Jeanne Mathieu, his father’s name was Jean Valjean or Vlajean, probably a nickname, a contraction of “voilà Jean.”2 Jean Valjean was thoughtful without being glum, which is typical of affectionate natures. All in all, though, there was something rather sleepy and insignificant, in appearance at least, about Jean Valjean. He had lost his mother and his father when he was very young. His mother died after childbirth of a bout of milk fever that was not properly treated. His father, a pruner like him, died when he fell from a tree. All that remained to Jean Valjean was his sister, who was older than he was, a widow with seven children, girls and boys. This sister had brought Jean Valjean up and, while her husband was still alive, she had lodged and fed her younger brother. Then the husband died. The eldest of the seven children was eight years old, the youngest, one. Jean Valjean had just turned twenty-four. He took the father’s place and in turn supported this sister who had brought him up. This was done automatically, as a duty, and even with a certain gruffness on Jean Valjean’s part. His youth was thus spent in hard and badly paid labour. He had never been known to have a “sweetheart” in the region. He had never had the time to fall in love.

At night he came home tired out and ate his soup without a word. While he ate, his sister, mother Jeanne, would often take out the best bits of his meal from his bowl—the chunk of meat, the strip of bacon, the cabbage heart—to give to one of her children. He would go on eating, hunched over the table with his head practically in the soup, his long hair falling around the soup bowl, hiding his eyes. He behaved as though he didn’t see a thing and did nothing to stop it. There was in Faverolles, not far from the Valjeans’ cottage, on the other side of the lane, a farmer’s wife named Marie-Claude. The Valjean children, who were always starving, sometimes went to “borrow” a pint of milk from Marie-Claude on their mother’s behalf, which they then guzzled behind a hedge or in some corner of the alley, snatching the pot away from one another so greedily that the little girls would spill some on their smocks and down their gullets. If the mother had known about this pilfering, she would have chastised the delinquents severely. Jean Valjean, brusque and gruff as he was, paid for Marie-Claude’s pint of milk behind their mother’s back and the children went unpunished.

In the pruning season, he made twenty-four sous a day;3 after that he would hire himself out as a harvester, as an unskilled worker, as a farmhand or cowherd, as any kind of casual labourer. He did what he could. His sister worked, too, but what can you do with seven children? They were a sad bunch, enveloped by a poverty that was slowly squeezing them dry. One winter was particularly rough. Jean had no work. The family had no bread. No bread. Literally. Seven children!

One Sunday night, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the church square in Faverolles, was getting ready to go to bed when he heard a loud crash and the sound of breaking glass at the barred window of his shop. He arrived just in time to see an arm shooting through the hole punched into the wire-meshed glass. The hand at the end of the arm grabbed a loaf of bread and the thief made off with it. Isabeau rushed out; the thief was running away as fast as his legs would carry him. Isabeau ran after him and stopped him. The thief had chucked the loaf of bread but his arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.

This happened in 1795. Jean Valjean was brought before the court of the day for “breaking and entering an inhabited house at night.” He had a gun, which he could use better than any marksman in the world, and he was something of a poacher and that went against him. There is a legitimate prejudice against poachers. The poacher, like the smuggler, verges a little too closely on the out-and-out crook. And yet, we might just say in passing, there is still a gulf between this species of men and the murderous city-dwelling criminal. The poacher lives in the forest; the smuggler lives in the mountains or by the sea. Cities turn out ferocious men because they make men corrupt. The mountains, the sea, the forest, make men wild. They bring out the fierce side of human nature but often without destroying the human side.

Jean Valjean was found guilty. The terms of the code were categorical. There are some fearful moments in our civilization; these are the moments when a sentence delivers a verdict of shipwreck. What a mournful instant it is when society withdraws and consummates the irreparable abandonment of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five years in the galleys.

On April 22, 1796, Paris resounded with the hue and cry over the victory of Montenotte,4 carried by the commander in chief of the Army of Italy, whom the message from the Directoire to the Five Hundred,5 dated Floréal 2, Year IV,6 called Buona-Parte; that same day a great human chain was shackled together at Bicêtre prison.7 Jean Valjean was part of that chain. An old prison doorman, who is close to ninety years old today, still remembers perfectly the poor wretch who was put in irons at the end of the fourth row in the north corner of the courtyard. This man was sitting on the ground like the rest of them. He appeared not to comprehend anything about his situation, except that it was awful. Most likely he also made out, through all the hazy notions of a poor and completely ignorant man, something excessive in it. As they were riveting the bolt of his collar shackle with great whacks of the hammer at the back of his neck, he wept, he choked on tears that prevented him from speaking; the only thing he managed to get out from time to time was: “I was a pruner in Faverolles.” Then, sobbing all the while, he raised his right hand and lowered it gradually seven times as though patting seven heads at different heights and through this gesture you could guess that whatever it was he had done, he had done it to feed and clothe seven small children.

He left for Toulon. He arrived there after a journey of twenty-seven days, on a cart, with the chain at his neck. In Toulon he was dressed in a red smock known as a paletot. Everything about his life was erased, right down to his name; he was no longer even Jean Valjean, he was number 24601. What became of his sister? What became of the seven children? Who was going to worry about that? What becomes of the handful of leaves from the yellow tree sawn off at its base?

It’s the same old story. These poor living beings, God’s creatures, now without support, without a guide, without shelter, drifted off aimlessly, scattered on the wind, who knows? each on their own, perhaps, plunging further and further into the cold mist that swallows up solitary destinies, an opaque gloom into which so many luckless people disappear, one after the other, in the solemn march of the human race. They left their home county. The bell tower of what was once their village forgot them; the boundary of what was once their field forgot them; after a few years’ sojourn in jail, Jean Valjean himself forgot them. In that heart where there once was a wound, was now a scar. That is all. During the whole time he was in Toulon he had only once heard talk of his sister. It was, I think, toward the end of his fourth year of captivity. I no longer remember through what channel the news reached him. Someone, who had known them back home, had seen his sister. She was in Paris. She lived in a mean street near Saint-Sulpice,8 the rue du Gindre. She had only one child with her by then, a little boy, the baby of the bunch. Where were the other six? She herself, perhaps, did not know. Every morning she went to a printer’s in the rue du Sabot, no. 3, where she was a folder and stitcher. She had to be there at six in the morning, well before daybreak in winter. In the same building as the printing works there was a school and she took her little boy, who was seven, there. Only, as she started work at six o’clock, and the school did not open till seven, the child had to wait for an hour, in the courtyard, for the school to open; an hour in the dark in winter in the open air! They wouldn’t let the boy come into the printer’s because he got in the way, they said. As they passed by of a morning, the workers would see the poor little mite sitting on the cobblestones, nodding off to sleep and sometimes sound asleep in the dark, crouched and curled up over his basket. When it rained, an old lady, the concierge, would take pity on him; she would take him into her shabby squat, where there was nothing but a pallet, a spinning wheel, and two wooden chairs, and the little boy would sleep there in a corner, cuddling up to the cat for warmth. At seven o’clock, the school would open and in he would go. That is what someone told Jean Valjean. They spoke to him about it, one day, and just for a moment, there was a flash of lightning, like a window suddenly opening on the destiny of these creatures he had loved, then everything shut again; he never heard another word about them again, not ever. Nothing further about them ever reached him; he never saw them again, never ran into them, and for the rest of this painful story, we will not stumble across them again.

Toward the end of this fourth year, Jean Valjean’s turn to escape arrived. His inmate pals helped him as they do in such sad places. He escaped. He wandered about for two days, free, in the fields; if you can call it being free to be hunted down, to whip your head round at every instant, to start at the slightest noise, to be frightened of anything and everything, of smoke coming from a roof, of a man passing by, of a dog, of a galloping horse, of the sound of the hour striking, of daylight because you can see, of night because you can’t see, of the road, the path, the bushes, of sleep. The night of the second day he was nabbed again. He had not eaten or slept for thirty-six hours. The maritime court sentenced him for this felony to a further three years, which gave him eight years. The sixth year, it was his turn to escape again; he took it, but he was not able to consummate his flight. He had missed roll call. A cannon was fired and that night the men on patrol found him hiding under the keel of a boat that was being built. He resisted the guards who seized him. Escape and resisting arrest—this infraction was dealt with by the provisions of the special code; the punishment was an increase of five years, two of them in double chains. Thirteen years. The tenth year, his turn came again, he took advantage of it again. But he did not make a better go of it this time, either. Three years for this latest attempt. Sixteen years. Finally, it was, I think, during the thirteenth year that he tried one last time, succeeding only in being caught again after a mere four hours on the outside. Three years he copped for those four hours. Nineteen years. In October 1815 he was released; he had gone in in 1796 for having broken a windowpane and taken a loaf of bread.

This is the place for a short parenthesis. This is the second time, in his study of the penal issue and of damnation by the law, that the author of this book has come across the theft of a loaf of bread as the point of departure for the destruction of someone’s life. Claude Gueux9 stole a loaf of bread; Jean Valjean stole a loaf of bread. British statistics show that in London four out of five thefts have hunger as their immediate cause.

Jean Valjean had gone to jail sobbing and shaking; he came out impassive. He had gone in desperate; he came out grim.

What had gone on in his soul?

VII. DESPAIR FROM THE INSIDE

LET’S TRY TO put it into words.

Society must look these issues in the face since it is society that produces them.

The man was, as we have said, an ignoramus; but he was not an imbecile. That inborn light was on inside—and there was somebody home. Tragedy, which sheds its own light, intensified the thin light of day that was in his mind. Under the bludgeon, under the chains, in solitary confinement, in exhaustion, under the harsh sun of jail, on the plank bed of the convict, he withdrew into his conscience and reflected.

He turned himself into judge and jury.

He began by passing judgment on himself.

He acknowledged that he was not an innocent man unjustly punished. He admitted to himself that he had committed an extreme and blameworthy act; that he might not have been refused the loaf of bread if he had asked for it; that, in any case, he should have waited for it to come to him either through pity or through work; that it is not altogether an unchallengeable comeback to say: Who can wait when they’re hungry?; that, to start with, it is extremely rare to literally die of hunger; second, that, happily or unhappily, man is so constituted that he can suffer for a long time and a great deal, morally and physically, without dying; that he should accordingly have had patience; that this would have been a lot better even for the seven poor children; that it was an act of madness, on his part, poor puny man, to grab society as a whole violently by the throat and to imagine that a person could get out of dire poverty by theft; that, in any case, it was the wrong door for getting out of dire poverty that admitted a man into infamy; in a word, that he had been in the wrong.

Then he asked himself:

If he were the only one who had been in the wrong in his fateful story? If it wasn’t a serious matter to start with that he, who was a worker, lacked work; that he, who was industrious, lacked bread. If, subsequently, with the wrong committed and confessed, the punishment hadn’t been ferocious and wildly excessive. If there hadn’t been more abuse on the part of the law than on the part of the one guilty of the wrong. If there hadn’t been too much weight in one of the pans of the scales, the one for expiation. If the excess weight of the penalty did not wipe out the crime and did not end in this result: reversing the situation, replacing the wrong of the delinquent with the wrong of the crackdown on him, turning the guilty party into the victim and the debtor into the creditor, and putting right squarely on the side of the very person who had violated it. If the sentence, complicated by the successive extensions of time for the escape attempts, did not wind up being a sort of assault by the strongest on the weakest, a crime committed by society against the individual, a crime that was committed afresh each day, a crime that went on for nineteen years.

He asked himself whether human society could have the right also to subject its members, on the one hand, to its crazy lack of foresight and, on the other, to its pitiless foresight, and to hold a poor man forever between a lack and an excess—lack of work and excess of punishment. If it were not outrageous that society dealt in this way precisely with those of its members who were the worst off in the parceling out of goods, which is the work of chance, and so, the most worthy of being handled with care.

These questions being put and resolved, he passed judgment on society and he condemned it.

He condemned it to his hate.

He made it responsible for the fate he suffered and told himself that he would quite likely not hesistate to call it to account for this one day. He said to himself that there was no balance between the damage he had done and the damage done to him; he finally concluded that his punishment was not, in all honesty, an injustice, but that it was without the shadow of a doubt an iniquity.

Rage can be wild and unfounded; you can be wrongfully stirred up. But you only feel outraged when you are fundamentally right to do so somewhere along the line. Jean Valjean felt outraged.

And then, human society had only ever done him harm. Never had he seen anything of it but this wrathful face that it calls Justice and that it shows to those it strikes. People had only ever touched him to wound him. All contact with them had been, for him, a blow. Never, since his childhood, since his mother, since his sister, never had he met with a kind word or a kind look. He had lurched from one suffering to the next and had gradually arrived at the conviction that life was a war; and that in this war he was the vanquished. He had no other weapon but his hate, and he resolved to hone it in jail and to take it with him when he got out.

There was in Toulon a school for the convicts run by the Ignorantine friars,1 where those of the wretched inmates who had the will to learn were taught the bare essentials. He was one of the ones who wanted to learn. At the age of forty, he started school and learned to read, write, and do sums. He felt that to strengthen his knowledge was to strengthen his hate. In certain cases, instruction and enlightenment can serve to shore up the harm done.

It is sad to have to say it, but after having judged the society that had brought him undone, he passed judgment on the Providence that had brought about that society.

He condemned it, too.

And so, during those nineteen years of torture and slavery, this poor soul both rose and fell at the same time. Light entered on one side and darkness on the other.

Jean Valjean was not, as we have seen, naturally bad. He was still good when he arrived in jail. Inside, he wrote society off and felt himself turn wicked; inside, he wrote Providence off and felt himself turn impious.

At this juncture it is hard not to ponder a little.

Can human nature turn itself inside out like that, so completely? Can man, created good by God, be made wicked by man? Can the soul be entirely remade by destiny and become bad if that destiny is bad? Can the heart become warped and catch incurable diseases and turn ugly under the pressure of some abnormally great woe, the way the vertebral column becomes warped under a too-low ceiling? Isn’t there in every human soul, wasn’t there in the soul of Jean Valjean, in particular, an initial spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in the next, that good can bring out, prime, ignite, set on fire and cause to blaze splendidly, and that evil can never entirely extinguish?

Grave and obscure questions, to the last of which any physiologist would probably have answered no, and without hestitating, if he had seen—in Toulon, in hours of rest, which were for Jean Valjean hours of reverie, as he sat, arms crossed, on the bar of some capstan, the end of his chain stuffed in his pocket to stop it from dragging—this forlorn galley slave,2 grave, silent, and pensive, a pariah of laws that look on man with anger, one of civilization’s damned, who looked so harshly on the heavens.

Certainly, and we do not wish to pretend otherwise, the observant physiologist would have seen irremediable misery there, would perhaps have felt sorry for this man made sick by the law, but he would not even have attempted a cure; he would have averted his gaze from the bottomless pit he had glimpsed in that soul, and, like Dante at the gates of hell, he would have erased from that existence the word that the finger of God nonetheless writes on the forehead of every man: Hope!

Was the state of mind that we have been trying to analyze as perfectly clear for Jean Valjean as we have tried to make it for our readers? Did Jean Valjean distinctly see, once they were formed, and had he distinctly seen, as they were forming, all the ingredients that went into his moral destitution? Did this uncouth illiterate really grasp the succession of ideas by which he had, step by step, climbed and slid down until he reached that mournful outlook that had for so many years now been the inner horizon of his mind? Was he fully conscious of all that had happened within him and all that stirred there? We would not dare say such a thing; we do not even think it. There was too much ignorance in Jean Valjean for him not to remain fairly unclear, even after so much misery. At times, he did not really know for sure what he felt. Jean Valjean was in darkness; he suffered in darkness; he hated in darkness; you could say he hated whatever was in front of him. He lived constantly in such shadow, groping like a blind man or a dreamer. Only, at intervals, there would suddenly come to him, from within or from without, a gust of rage, an added burst of suffering, a pale and rapid flash of lightning that would illuminate his entire soul and would suddenly reveal all around him, before and behind, in the glare of a ghastly light, the awful sheer drops and grim overhangs of his fate.

Once the lightning had passed, night would fall once more, and where was he? He could no longer tell.

The peculiar feature of sentences of this kind, in which what is pitiless, meaning brutalizing, dominates, is to gradually transform a man into a wild animal through a sort of stupid transfiguration. Sometimes into a ferocious animal, at that. Jean Valjean’s repeated and dogged attempts to escape are enough to prove how strangely the law worked on the human soul. Jean Valjean would have tried to break out again and gone on trying, however utterly crazy and pointless such attempts might be, as many times as the occasion presented itself, without thinking for an instant about the consequences or about his previous experiences. He escaped impulsively, like a wolf that finds its cage open. Instinct told him: Run! Reason would have told him: Stay! But faced with such a violent temptation, reason vanished; only instinct remained. The animal alone acted. When he was nabbed again, the new severities inflicted on him only served to make him wilder.

There is one detail that we should not leave out and this is that not one of the galley inmates could hold a candle to him in physical strength. In hard labour, for twisting a cable or turning a windlass, Jean Valjean was equal to four men. He would sometimes lift and carry enormous weights on his back and would occasionally himself replace the tool known as a cric, or jack, which used to be called an orgueil, or pride, from which, by the way, the name of the rue Montorgueil near Les Halles3 in Paris derived. His inmate pals had nicknamed him Jean-le-Cric. Once, when the balcony of the Toulon mairie was being repaired, one of Puget’s wonderful caryatids,4 which support the balcony, came loose and was about to fall off. Jean Valjean, who happened to be there, propped the caryatid up by his shoulder, giving the workers time to get there.

His suppleness actually surpassed his strength. Certain convicts, who are always hatching escape plans, end up turning combined strength and skill into a veritable science—the science of muscles. A whole mysterious regimen of statics is practised on a daily basis by prisoners, those eternal enviers of flies and birds. To scale a sheer vertical wall and find toeholds and handholds in places where you could barely see a bump was child’s play for Jean Valjean. Give him a chunk of wall, and with the tension of his back and his knees, with his elbows and heels jammed into the rough edges of the stone, he would hoist himself up three stories, as though by magic. Sometimes he would climb up to the rooftop of the jail like this.

He said little. He never laughed. Some extreme emotion was required to wring out of him, once or twice a year, that lugubrious cackle of the convict, which is like the echo of a demon’s laugh. To look at him, you would think he was busy staring endlessly at something terrible.

He was, in effect, absorbed.

Through the unhealthy perception of a stunted nature and an intelligence that had been laid to waste, he felt vaguely that something monstrous was sitting on his back. In the dim bleak haze in which he crawled, every time he craned his neck and tried to look up, he saw, with a mixture of terror and rage, piling up and looming in tiers that soared out of sight above him, with horrible sheer walls, a sort of horrifying heap of things, laws, prejudices, men, and deeds, whose contours escaped him, whose bulk terrified him, and which was nothing more than that prodigious pyramid we call civilization. Here and there he could make out, in this teeming, amorphous mass, now close up, now far away on inaccessibly high plains, some group, some detail sharply illuminated; here the guard with his truncheon, here the gendarme with his sword, over there the mitred bishop, and at the very top, in a sort of blaze of sunlight, the emperor, crowned and dazzling. It seemed to him that these remote splendours, far from dispelling his own darkness, made it all the more funereal and black. All that—laws, prejudices, deeds, men, things—was coming and going above him, according to the complex and mysterious movement God imparts to civilization, walking on top of him and crushing him with an unspeakably calm cruelty and remorseless indifference. Souls who have hit rock bottom as far as possible calamity goes, unhappy men lost in the depths of that limbo where no one looks anymore, the law’s rejects feel the full weight on their heads of this human society, so forbidding if you are outside it, so terrifying if you are underneath it.

In this situation, Jean Valjean mused, and what do you think was the nature of his musings?

If the millet seed under the millstone had thoughts, it would doubtless think exactly what Jean Valjean thought.

All these things, realities full of phantoms, phantasmagoria full of realities, had ended up providing him with a sort of inner state you would be hard pressed to put into words.

At times, in the middle of his prison labours, he would stop … and think. His reason, at once more mature and more disturbed than before, would revolt. All that had happened to him seemed absurd; all that surrounded him did not seem possible. He told himself it was a dream. He looked at the guard standing a few feet away; the screw seemed like a phantom, yet suddenly the phantom would give him a whack with his truncheon.

The natural world scarcely existed for him. It would almost be true to say that for Jean Valjean, there was no sun, there were no lovely summer days, no radiant skies, no fresh April dawns. Only an awful thin light managed to reach him through the basement window of his soul.

By way of conclusion, to sum up what can be summed up and translated into concrete terms in all that we have just outlined, we will just say that, in nineteen years, Jean Valjean, the harmless tree pruner of Faverolles, the fearsome galley slave of Toulon, had become capable, thanks to the way the galleys had moulded him, of two kinds of bad deed: first, some swift, unpremeditated act full of frenzy, performed entirely instinctively as a sort of reprisal for the wrong endured; second, some seriously criminal act, consciously debated and mulled over with the false notions such misery can give rise to. His premeditated ideas went through the three successive phases available only to natures of a certain cast: reasoning, will, determination. What moved him was habitual indignation, the bitterness in his soul, a profound sense of the iniquities he had been subject to, a reaction against even the good, the innocent, and the just, if such there be. The beginning and end of all his thoughts was the same: hatred of human law, the hatred that, if it is not nipped in the bud by some miraculous event, turns, within a certain time frame, into hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, then hatred of creation, and is translated into a vague and constant and brutal desire to do harm, to anyone at all, to any living being, whoever they may be.

So, as you can see, it was not for no reason that the passport described Jean Valjean as a very dangerous man.

Year by year, slowly but surely, his soul had dried up. Dry heart, dry eye. When he got out of jail, he had not shed a tear in nineteen years.

VIII. THE DARK AND THE DEEP

MAN OVERBOARD!

Who cares! The ship does not stop. The wind is blowing and that particular doom-laden ship has a course to keep. On it sails.

The man disappears, then reappears, he dives down and comes back to the surface, he calls out, he waves his arms around; no one hears him. The ship shudders in the gale, fully focussed on its manoeuvring, and the sailors and the passengers can’t even see the submerged man anymore; his miserable head is just a dot in the vastness of the waves.

He hurls desperate cries out into the depths. The sail looks so ghostly as it vanishes into the distance! He watches it, he watches it for all he’s worth. It is moving away, it is becoming faint, it is getting smaller. He was on that ship just a moment ago, he was part of the crew, he came and went on deck with the rest of them, he had his share of air, of sunlight, he was alive. What the hell happened? He slipped, he fell, and now, the jig’s up.

He is in the monstrous waters with only their roiling and heaving beneath him. The waves are torn and ripped to shreds by the wind and close in on him sickeningly; the rolling abyss sweeps him away, all the tattered water whips around his head, a mob of waves spits at him, vague tunnels of water half-devour him; every time he goes under, he glimpses sheer drops of unfathomable darkness; weird unfamiliar plants seize him, bind his feet, pull him under; he feels himself becoming one with the abyss, he is part of the foam, the waves toss him from one to the other, he gulps down bitterness, the spineless ocean is raring to drown him, the vastness toys with him, dragging out his last gasps. All that water feels like liquid hate.

Yet he struggles, he tries to defend himself, he tries to keep going, he makes an effort, he swims. His pitiful strength immediately exhausted, he struggles against the inexhaustible.

Where can the ship have got to? Over there. Barely visible in the pale blur of the horizon.

Gusts of wind come up; each head of foam batters him. He looks up and all he sees is the lividness of the clouds. In his death throes, he witnesses the immense madness of the sea. He is tortured to death by this insanity. He hears sounds unfamiliar to man that seem to come from beyond the earth—from some unimaginable and awful otherworld.

There are birds in the thick cloud cover, just as there are angels hovering over human hardships, but what can they do for him? They fly, sing, and soar while he, he moans in agony.

He feels buried at once by those two infinities, the ocean and the sky; the one a grave, the other a shroud.

Night comes bearing down and he has been swimming for hours, his strength is almost gone; the ship, that distant speck where once there were men, has faded from view; he is alone in the dreadful crepuscular gulf, he goes under, he is getting stiff, he thrashes around, he feels the monstrous waves of the invisible below him, he calls out.

There are no men anymore. Where is God?

He calls and calls. Anyone! Anyone! He goes on calling. Nothing on the horizon. Nothing in the sky.

He implores the expanse stretching away, the waves, the seaweed, the rocks; they are all deaf. He pleads with the storm; the imperturbable storm obeys only infinity.

Around him, darkness, mist, solitude, the oblivious thundering tumult, the endless chaotic puckering and churning of the wild waters. Inside him, horror and fatigue. Under him, the drop. Nothing to hang on to, no foothold. He thinks of the murky adventures of his corpse falling through the limitless gloom. The bottomless cold paralyzes him. His hands clench and curl up and grasp at nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlpools, gusts, useless stars! What can he do? The despairing give up, the weary decide to die, they stop resisting, they go with the flow, let go, and off they go, the drowned, rolling away forever in the gloomy depths of engulfment.

O relentless march of human society! All the men and souls lost along the way, written off! Ocean into which all those that the law drops, fall! Vile withdrawal of all help! O moral death!

The sea is that inexorable social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has damned. The sea is measureless misery.

The soul, drifting with the current in the plumbless deep, can turn into a corpse. Who will resuscitate it?

IX. FRESH GRIEVANCES

WHEN THE TIME came for him to get out of jail, when Jean Valjean heard in his ear those strange words: You are free! the moment was unreal, unbelievable; a ray of blinding light, a ray of the real light of the living suddenly shot through him. But this light swiftly faded. Jean Valjean had been dazzled by the idea of freedom. He had believed in a new life. He very soon saw what kind of freedom a yellow passport entails.

And this brought much more bitter disillusionment. He had calculated that what he had saved during his stay in jail amounted to one hundred and seventy-one francs. To be fair, we should add that he had forgotten to include in his calculations the fact that Sundays and public holidays were compulsory days off, which, over nineteen years, meant deducting around twenty-four francs. On top of that his savings had been reduced by various local charges to the sum of one hundred and nine francs and fifteen sous, which had been counted out and handed over to him as he was leaving.

He did not understand any of this and believed himself to have been short-changed—let’s not mince words, robbed.

The day after he was released, in Grasse, he saw some men unloading bales of orange blossom outside a distillery.1 He offered his services. The job was urgent so they took him on. He set to work. He was smart, robust, and adroit; he did his best, and the foreman seemed happy. But while he was working, a gendarme came past, spotted him, and demanded to see his papers. He had to show his yellow passport. That done, Jean Valjean went back to work. A bit before this, he had quizzed one of the workers about the daily rate they earned for the job; they told him that it was thirty sous. That evening, since he was forced to head out the following morning, he turned up at the distillery foreman’s and asked for his pay. The foreman didn’t say a word, just handed him twenty-five sous. He demanded the rest. The foreman replied: “That’s good enough for the likes of you.” He stood his ground. The foreman looked him in the eyes and said: “Watch out you don’t end up back inside!” Once more, he considered himself robbed.

Society, the state, in diminishing his savings, had robbed him in a big way. Now it was the turn of the individual to rob him in a small way.

Release is not the same as liberation. You get out of jail, all right, but you never stop being condemned.

So that is what happened to him in Grasse. We have seen the welcome he was given in Digne.

X. THE MAN WAKES UP

AND SO, AS the cathedral clock struck two in the morning, Jean Valjean woke up.

What woke him up was that the bed was just too good. He had not gone to sleep in a bed for going on twenty years and although he had not taken his clothes off, the sensation was too novel not to disturb his sleep.

He had slept for over four hours. His weariness had passed. He was used to not giving many hours over to rest.

He opened his eyes and peered into the darkness around him for a while, then he closed them again to go back to sleep.

When your day has been teeming with different sensations, when you have things on your mind, you can get to sleep to start with but you can’t get back to sleep. Sleep comes a lot more easily than it comes back. This was the case with Jean Valjean. He could not get back to sleep and he began to think.

He was in one of those states where our ideas get blurred. There was a sort of cloudy swirling in his brain. His old memories and his most immediate memories floated around pell-mell and bumped into each other at random, losing their shapes, becoming crazily magnified, then evaporating suddenly, like mud stirred up in a pool of water. Many thoughts came to him, but there was one that would not go away and that sent all the others scurrying. This thought we will tell you without further ado: He had spotted the six silver knives and forks and the silver ladle that Madame Magloire had laid on the table.

These six silver sets of cutlery obsessed him. They were just sitting there. A few feet away. The very moment he crossed the room next door to come into the room he was now in, the old servant had put them away in a cupboard at the head of the bed. He had, naturally, noted this cupboard. On the right, as you enter by the dining room. They were solid silver. And old silver, at that. For the ladle, you’d get at least two hundred francs. Double what he’d earned in nineteen years. True, he would have earned more if the “administration” hadn’t “robbed him.” His mind wavered for a good hour, and his hesitation certainly involved some struggle. The clock struck three. He opened his eyes again, promptly sat up, shot out his arm, and groped for his haversack, which he had thrown into the corner of the alcove, then swung his legs over the side of the bed and placed his feet on the floor and found himself sitting up straight on the bed, not knowing how he’d got into that position.

He remained sitting there in that position, thinking, for some time, and anyone who’d seen him sitting there in the dark, the only person awake in the sleeping household, would have found him a sinister sight. Suddenly he bent down, took off his shoes, and put them gently on the mat beside the bed, then he resumed his position, sitting still and thinking.

In the middle of this vile rumination, the ideas we just mentioned kept stirring around in his brain, coming and going and coming back again, seemingly bearing down on him like a ton of bricks; and then, without knowing why, and with that automatic persistence of reverie, he thought at the same time about a convict named Brevet whom he had known in jail, and whose trousers used to be held up by a single brace of knitted cotton. The checked pattern of that brace kept coming back to him without letup.

He remained sitting there and would perhaps have stayed there like that until daybreak if the clock had not struck a single note—to mark the quarter hour or half hour. The clock seemed to say to him: Let’s go!

He rose to his feet, hesitated a moment longer and listened; all was quiet in the house, so he headed straight for the window, which he could make out, taking small careful steps. The night was not very dark; there was a full moon with big clouds racing across it, chased by the wind. This produced bursts of light and dark outside, eclipses and lightning flashes, and inside, a sort of twilight. This twilight, enough to guide his path, intermittent because of the clouds, was like the livid light that falls from a basement window when people are coming and going outside. When he reached the window, Jean Valjean looked closely at it. It had no bars, it opened on to the garden, and it was shut, in keeping with the custom of these parts, with only a tiny latch. He opened it, but as cold, sharp air rushed in, he closed it again instantly. He looked at the garden with that penetrating gaze that sizes up more than it sees. The garden was enclosed by a fairly low white wall, easily scaled. Behind it, on the other side, he could make out the tops of trees evenly spaced, which indicated that the wall divided the garden from an avenue or lane planted with trees.

Having given the scene the once-over, he acted like a man who knows what he’s doing, walked over to his alcove, grabbed his haversack, opened it, fumbled around inside, took out something that he placed on the bed, stuck his shoes in one of his pockets, did the bag up again, hoisted it onto his shoulders, clapped his cap on his head, jamming the peak down over his eyes, felt for his stick, and went and put it in the corner of the window, then returned to the bed and resolutely seized the object he had laid on it. It was a short iron bar, sharpened at one end like a hunting spear.

In the dark it would have been hard to work out what this piece of iron was made for. Was it perhaps a lever? Was it perhaps a club?

In daylight, you would have recognized that it was just an ordinary miner’s spike. In those days convicts were sometimes put to work quarrying stone from the high hills that surround Toulon, and it was not unusual for them to carry around miners’ tools. Miner’s spikes were made of solid iron, with a point at the bottom end for hoeing into the rock.

He took this spike in his right hand and, holding his breath and treading softly, he headed for the door of the room next door, the bishop’s room, as you’ll recall. When he reached the door, he found it ajar. The bishop had not closed it.

XI. WHAT HE DOES NEXT

JEAN VALJEAN LISTENED. NOT a sound.

He pushed the door.

He pushed it with one finger, lightly, with that furtive anxious restraint of a cat that wants to come inside.

The door yielded to the pressure, silently and imperceptibly opening the gap a little wider.

He waited a moment, then pushed the door again, more forcefully.

It continued to yield in silence. The gap was wide enough now for him to slip through. But near the door a small table was in the way, forming as it did a sort of awkward angle with the door.

Jean Valjean saw the problem. But he had to open the door wider no matter what.

He steeled his resolve and pushed the door a third time, more energetically. This time a badly oiled hinge suddenly sent out a prolonged and raucous screech into the darkness.

Jean Valjean jumped. The noise of the hinge rang in his ears, as resounding and terrible as the trumpet of the Last Judgment.

In the eerie amplification of that initial moment, he almost imagined that the hinge had come alive, suddenly taking on a terrible life of its own and barking a warning to the world like a dog rousing the sleeping from their slumber.

He stopped in his tracks, shivering, distraught, and tipped back from the balls of his feet onto his heels. He could hear his pulse thumping in his temples like a pair of sledgehammers, and it seemed to him that his breath came from his chest with the sound the wind makes rushing out of a cave. It seemed to him impossible that the horrible clamour of the outraged hinge had not shaken the whole house like the shock of an earthquake; the door, pushed by him, had taken fright and screamed; the old man would soon be up, the two old women would cry out, someone would come running to their aid; before a quarter of an hour was up, the town would be buzzing and the gendarmerie on the move. For a moment, he thought the jig was up.

He stayed where he was, petrified like the proverbial pillar of salt, not daring to make a move. Some minutes passed. The door was wide open now. He risked a peek at the room. Nothing had moved. He cocked an ear. Nothing in the house was stirring. The noise of the rusty hinge had woken no one.

This initial danger was over, but he still felt a dreadful turmoil inside. Yet he did not back down. Even when he had thought the jig was up, he had not backed down. His only thought now was to get it over with as quickly as possible. He stepped into the room. The room was perfectly still. Here and there various blurred shapes could vaguely be made out, which, by day, were papers scattered over the table, open folios, books piled on a stool, an armchair heaped with clothes, and a prie-dieu, but at this hour, they were no more than dark shadows and whitish spots. Jean Valjean crept forward carefully to avoid bumping into the furniture. At the back of the room he could hear the quiet, even breathing of the bishop, fast asleep.

Suddenly he stopped. He was on top of the bed before he knew it; it had taken no time at all.

Nature sometimes makes connections between our actions and its own special effects and star turns with a sort of sombre and intelligent aptness, as though it wanted to make us sit up and think. For nearly half an hour, a huge cloud had covered the sky. The very moment Jean Valjean stopped, facing the bed, this cloud broke up as though it had done so on purpose and a ray of moonlight shot through the long window and suddenly lit up the bishop’s pale face. He was sleeping peacefully, untroubled. Though in bed, he was almost fully dressed because of the bitterly cold nights of the Lower Alps, decked out in a brown woolen garment that covered his arms to the wrists. His head was thrown back against the pillow in the abandoned attitude of sleep; over the side of the bed his hand dangled, adorned with his pastoral ring—the hand that had performed so many good works and saintly deeds. His whole face was luminous with a vague expression of contentment, hope, and bliss. It was more than a smile, almost a radiance. On his forehead lay the ineffable reflection of a light invisible to the naked eye. The souls of the just in sleep contemplate a mysterious heaven.

A reflection of this heaven lay over the bishop.

It was at the same time a luminous transparency, for this heaven was inside him. This heaven was the internal light of his conscience.

At the moment that the moonlight superimposed itself, so to speak, on this inner limpidity, the sleeping bishop appeared bathed in glory. And yet that glory remained soft and veiled in an ineffable half-light. The moon in the sky, dozing nature, the garden so still, the house so calm, the hour, the moment, the silence, added something oddly solemn and moving to the venerable rest of this good man, and wrapped in a sort of majestic and serene aureole his white hair and those closed eyes, this face where all was hope and where all was trust, the head of an old man sleeping like a baby.

There was something almost divine about the man, so unself-consciously august was he.

Jean Valjean, on the other hand, was in the shadow, his iron spike in hand, standing erect, rigid, terrified at this luminous old man. He had never seen anything like it. Such trust horrified him. The moral world offers no greater sight than this: a troubled and overwrought conscience, brought to the brink of some evil deed, gazing upon the sleep of a just man.

Such sleep, in such isolation, with only the likes of him for company, had something sublime about it that he was dimly but powerfully aware of.

No one could have said what was happening inside him, not even himself. To try to grasp it, we need to imagine the most violent of men in the presence of the most gentle. Even on his face, you could not have made out anything distinct with any certainty. His expression was one of a sort of crazed amazement. He saw what he saw, and that was that. But what was he thinking? It would have been impossible to guess. What was obvious was that he was moved and deeply distressed. But what kind of emotion was that, exactly?

He couldn’t take his eyes off the old man. The only thing that could clearly be discerned in his demeanor and on his countenance was a strange indecisiveness. You would have said he was hesitating on the brink of two yawning chasms, the one where you are lost and the one where you are saved—doom or salvation. He looked as though he was ready either to smash the old man’s skull in or to kiss his hand.

After a few moments, Jean Valjean raised his left hand slowly to his forehead and took off his cap, then let his arm fall back just as slowly, and with that he retreated into his thoughts, his cap in his left hand, his club in his right, his hair standing up on end over his savage head.

The bishop went on sleeping in profound peace beneath this frightening stare.

A reflection of moonlight made the crucifix above the mantelpiece dimly visible; it seemed to be opening its arms to both of them, in benediction for the one and forgiveness for the other.

All of a sudden Jean Valjean clapped his cap back on his head, then strode to the head of the bed without giving the bishop another glance and straight to the cupboard, which he could make out next to the head of the bed; he raised the miner’s spike as though he was about to force the lock. But the key was in it. So he turned it. The first thing he saw was the basket of silverware. He grabbed it, bounded across the room without worrying about the noise, whipped through the door, ran back to the oratory, shoved the window open, grabbed his stick, climbed over the windowsill, threw the silver into his knapsack, flung the basket away, raced across the garden, leaped over the wall like a tiger and fled.

XII. THE BISHOP AT WORK

THE NEXT DAY at sunrise, Monseigneur Bienvenu was circling his garden. Madame Magloire ran to him, quite beside herself.

“Monseigneur, Monseigneur,” she cried, “does Your Grace know where the silverware basket is?”

“Yes,” said the bishop.

“God be praised!” she replied. “I didn’t know what had happened to it.”

The bishop had just picked the basket from out of a garden bed. He handed it to Madame Magloire.

“Here it is.”

“But!” she said, flustered. “There’s nothing in it! What about the silver?”

“Ah!” said the bishop. “So it’s the silver you’re worried about? I don’t know where that is.”

“Good God in heaven! It’s been stolen! That man from last night! He’s stolen it!”

In the blink of an eye, with all the sprightliness of a frisky old watchdog, Madame Magloire tore off to the oratory, into the alcove, and back again to the bishop. The bishop had just bent down, heaving a sigh, and was examining a cochlearia des Guillons that the basket had broken when it landed in the garden bed. He straightened up again at Madame Magloire’s shriek.

“Monseigneur, the man’s gone! The silver’s been stolen!”

While she was yelling the news, her eyes fell on a corner of the garden where you could see traces of a scramble. A brick in the wall had been ripped out.

“Look! That’s where he got away. He jumped over into the ruelle Cochefilet! Ah! The swine! He stole our silver on us!” The bishop remained silent for a moment, then he looked up with a grave expression on his face and spoke softly to Madame Magloire: “To start with, was the silver really ours?” Madame Magloire was flabbergasted. There was another silence and then the bishop went on: “Madame Magloire, I was wrong to hang on to that silver—and for so long. It belonged to the poor. What was that man? He was poor, evidently.” “God help us!” Madame Magloire retorted. “It’s not me or Mademoiselle I’m worried about. We couldn’t care less. It’s Monseigneur. What is Monseigneur going to eat with now?” The bishop looked at her in amazement.

“Ah, is that all! Don’t we have any pewter cutlery?”

Madame Magloire shrugged her shoulders.

“Pewter smells bad.”

“Well, then, iron.”

Madame Magloire pulled a face.

“Iron tastes bad.”

“Well, then, wood.”

A few moments later, he was eating at the same table that Jean Valjean had sat at the night before. While he ate, Monseigneur Bienvenu chirruped gaily to his sister, who said nothing, and to Madame Magloire, who muttered under her breath that there really was no need for spoons or forks, even of wood, to dunk a bit of bread in a glass of milk.

“Did you ever hear such a thing!” Madame Magloire said to herself as she came and went. “Fancy letting a man like that come into your home! And to put him up, right next to your own bed! And what a stroke of luck that all he did was steal! Mary, Mother of God! It makes your hair stand on end just thinking about it!” Just as the brother and sister were getting up from the table, there was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” said the bishop.

The door opened. A weird and wild-looking bunch stood on the doorstep. Three men were holding a fourth by the scruff of the neck. The three men were gendarmes; the other man was Jean Valjean.

A sergeant of the gendarmerie, who seemed to be the leader of the group, stood nearest the door. He came in and strode over to the bishop, giving him a military salute.

“Monseigneur—” he began.

At that, Jean Valjean, who looked glum and broken, lifted his eyes, startled.

“Monseigneur,” he murmured. “So this isn’t the local curé?”

“Quiet!” said one of the gendarmes. “This is Monseigneur, the bishop.”

But Monseigneur Bienvenu had gone over to the men as fast as his old pins would carry him.

“Ah, there you are!” he cried, looking straight at Jean Valjean. “Am I glad to see you! But, heavens! I gave you the candlesticks, too, you know; they are made of silver like the rest and you can get two hundred francs for them, easily. Why didn’t you take them with the cutlery?” Jean Valjean’s eyes nearly popped out of his head; he looked at the venerable bishop with an expression no human tongue could convey.

“Monseigneur,” said the sergeant, “is what this man said true, then? We saw him hotfooting it out of town. He looked like he was on the run. So we arrested him to be on the safe side. He had all this silver—” “And he told you,” the bishop broke in with a smile, “that it had been given to him by some old codger of a priest whose place he’d spent the night in? I can see how it looks. So you’ve brought him back here? There has been a misunderstanding.” “If that’s the case,” the sergeant said, “can we let him go?”

“You must,” said the bishop.

The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who visibly shrank back.

“Are you really letting me go?” he said in a voice that was barely articulate, as muffled as if he were talking in his sleep.

“Yes, we’re letting you go; something wrong with your ears!” said one of the gendarmes.

“My dear friend,” said the bishop, “before you go, here are your candlesticks. Take them.”

He went to the mantelpiece, swept up the two silver candlesticks, and handed them over to Jean Valjean. The two women watched the bishop without a word, without a movement, without a glance that might upset him.

Jean Valjean’s whole body was shaking. He took the two candlesticks automatically and with a stricken look on his face.

“Now,” said the bishop, “go in peace. Speaking of which, when you come back, my friend, there’s no need to go through the garden. You can always come and go through the front door on the street. It is only ever on the latch, night and day.” He then turned to the policemen and said:

“Gentlemen, you may go.”

The gendarmes headed off.

Jean Valjean looked as though he were about to pass out.

The bishop went over to him and said to him in a voice just above a whisper: “Don’t forget, don’t ever forget, that you promised me to use this silver to make an honest man of yourself.” Jean Valjean, who had no memory of ever having promised a thing, remained stunned. The bishop had emphasized every word as he spoke. He went on with a kind of solemnity: “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you; I am taking it away from black thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I am giving it to God.” XIII. PETIT-GERVAIS

JEAN VALJEAN LEFT TOWN as though he were still on the run. He practically broke into a trot when he hit the open countryside in his anxiety to get away, blindly taking whatever paths and tracks he stumbled on without realizing that he was going round in circles. He snaked about like this all morning, without eating a thing and without feeling in the least hungry. He was in the grip of a whole host of new sensations. He felt a kind of rage, he knew not at whom. He couldn’t tell whether he felt moved or humiliated. A strange sensation of tenderness came over him at times, but he fought it and threw the hardness of the last twenty years up against it like a screen, warding it off. This state wore him out. He watched in alarm as the kind of frightening calm that the injustice of his rotten fate had produced melted away inside him. He wondered what on earth could take its place. There were moments when he really would have preferred to be slammed behind bars with the gendarmes and for things not to have taken such an incredible turn; at least he wouldn’t have been so churned up. Even though the season was fairly advanced, there were still a few late-blooming flowers here and there in the hedges, and as he walked along, clouds of perfume brought back childhood memories. These memories were almost unbearable, it was so long since they had last appeared.

A welter of whirring thoughts he could not have put into words banked up inside him like this the whole day.

As the sun set at the end of the day, dragging out the shadow on the ground of the tiniest pebble, Jean Valjean sat behind a bush in a great red plain that was absolutely deserted. The only thing on the horizon was the chain of the Alps. Otherwise, not even a church steeple in a distant village. Jean Valjean might have been about three miles from Digne. A path that cut through the plain ran past just a few feet from the bush.

While he was lost in thought, a meditative state that would have contributed not a little to the frightening effect of his rags on anyone unlucky enough to run into him, he heard a joyful sound.

He turned his head and saw a young Savoyard,1 an itinerant chimney sweep, of about twelve skipping along the path singing, a hurdy-gurdy, or vielle, at his side and a cherrywood box on his back; he was one of those chirpy little strays that roam the countryside, with their knees peeping through the holes in their trousers.

Still singing, the child paused now and then to play jacks with a few coins he was carrying—his entire fortune, probably. One of the coins was a forty-sou piece.

The boy stopped beside the bush without spotting Jean Valjean and tossed his handful of sous into the air. Up until that moment, he had caught them all pretty skillfully on the back of his hand.

This time the forty-sou piece eluded him and went rolling toward the bush over to Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean instantly slammed his foot on top of it.

But the boy had followed it with his eyes, and saw what happened.

He was not put out at all and went straight over to the man.

The place was completely isolated. As far as the eye could see there was no one on the plain or walking along the track. The only sound was the feeble cries of a flock of migratory birds flying across the sky at immense height. The boy stood with his back to the sun, which shot through his hair, turning it to threads of spun gold and flushing the savage face of Jean Valjean with a blood-red glow.

“Monsieur,” said the little Savoyard with that childish trust that is a blend of complete ignorance and complete innocence, “my coin?” “What’s your name?” asked Jean Valjean.

“Petit-Gervais, Monsieur.”

“Get lost,” said Jean Valjean.

“Monsieur,” the child persisted, “give me back my coin.”

Jean Valjean lowered his head and did not respond. The child repeated:

“My coin, Monsieur!”

Jean Valjean went on staring at the ground.

“My coin!” cried the child. “My silver coin! I want my money!”

Jean Valjean seemed not to have heard him, or to understand plain French. The boy grabbed him by the collar and shook him, at the same time trying hard to shift the great hobnailed boot from off his treasure.

“I want my piece! My forty-sou piece!”

The child began to cry. Jean Valjean’s head shot up. He was still squatting on the ground. His eyes looked troubled. He examined the boy with a sort of wonder, then he reached for his stick and yelled in a terrible voice: “Who’s there?” “Me, Monsieur,” the boy replied. “Petit-Gervais! Me! Me! Give me back my forty sous, please! Take your foot away, Monsieur, please!” Then, tiny as he was, the boy lost his temper and managed to sound almost threatening: “For pity’s sake! Will you take your foot away? Take your foot away, right now!” “Ah, you’re still here!” said Jean Valjean, and suddenly springing up, foot still on the coin, he added: “I’d get cracking if I was you!” The terrified child looked at him and then began to quiver from head to toe and, after a few seconds of standing there stunned, he ran away as fast as his little legs would carry him, not daring to look back or to let out a whimper.

But after a certain distance, he was out of breath and forced to stop, and Jean Valjean, lost in a daze as he was, heard him sobbing.

A few seconds later, the boy had vanished.

The sun had gone down.

The shadows gathered around Jean Valjean. He hadn’t eaten all day; it is likely that he had a fever.

He stayed on his feet, rooted to the spot, not having budged since the boy fled. His chest heaved as he breathed slowly and unevenly. His eyes were riveted to a spot ten or twelve feet ahead, as though he were completely fixated on a shard of old blue pottery lying in the grass. Suddenly he shuddered; he had begun to feel the cold night air.

He pulled his cap down over his forehead, fumbled mechanically to do up his smock, took a step forward and stooped to pick his stick up off the ground.

At that moment he spotted the forty-sou coin that he had half-ground into the dirt with his foot and that was glistening among the pebbles. The sight of it was a bolt from the blue.

“What the hell is that?” he hissed between clenched teeth.

He took a few steps back, without being able to take his eyes off the spot he had trampled underfoot only a moment before, as though the thing shining there in the darkness were an open eye staring up at him.

After a few moments he lunged convulsively at the coin, snatched it off the ground, and stood holding it, motionless, staring off into the farthest reaches of the plain, casting his eye at all points along the horizon, upright and shivering like a frightened wild animal looking for a place to hide.

He couldn’t see a thing. Night was coming down, the plain was cold, and murky, great violet mists were swirling up in the glimmering twilight.

He let out an “Ah!” and set off at a fast pace in the direction the child had taken before he disappeared. After a hundred feet or so, he stopped and looked around but still saw nothing.

Then he called out at the top of his lungs: “Petit-Gervais! Petit-Gervais!”

He shut his mouth and waited.

No one answered.

The countryside was deserted and mournful. He was surrounded on all sides by empty space. There was nothing all around but semi-darkness, in which his gaze was lost, and silence, in which his voice was lost.

A freezing northerly wind was blowing, the icy blast of winter, lending the things around him a sort of woeful life. Stunted shrubs shook their skinny little limbs in unbelievable fury. You would have sworn they were threatening someone and chasing after him.

He started walking again and then he started running, from time to time stopping and calling out in the lonely wilderness in the most fearsome and the most desolate voice you could possibly imagine: “Petit-Gervais! Petit-Gervais!” Naturally, if the boy had heard him, he’d have been frightened stiff and quickly ducked for cover. But the child was already, no doubt, far away.

He ran into a priest on horseback and went up to him and said: “Monsieur le curé, have you seen a boy go by?” “No,” said the priest.

“Kid by the name of Petit-Gervais?”

“I haven’t seen a soul.”

He took two five-franc pieces out of his bag and handed them to the priest.

“Monsieur curé, for your poor … Monsieur curé, he’s just a little kid of about ten with a wooden box on his back, I think, and a hurdy-gurdy. He was heading this way. One of the chimney-sweep kids. A Savoyard, you know?” “I haven’t seen him.”

“Petit-Gervais? He’s not from any of the villages around here, is he? Can’t you tell me?”

“If it’s as you say, my friend, the boy must be a foreigner. They come through here in droves. We haven’t a clue who they are.” Jean Valjean swiftly produced two more five-franc pieces and handed them to the priest.

“For your poor,” he said.

Then he added on a wild note: “Monsieur abbé, arrest me. I am a thief.”

The priest dug his heels in and galloped away, frightened out of his wits.

Jean Valjean started to run again in the direction he had first taken.

He ran on for quite some distance, peering around, calling out, shouting, but he met no one. Two or three times he ran toward something off the beaten track that looked to him like someone lying down or crouching; it always turned out to be a clump of brushwood or a flat outcrop of rock. At last, where three paths intersected, he stopped. The moon had risen. He strained to see in the distance and called one last time: “Petit-Gervais! Petit-Gervais!” His cry died out in the mist without even raising an echo. He mumbled once more, “Petit-Gervais!” but his voice was weak now, barely a murmur. That was a last-ditch attempt; his legs suddenly gave way beneath him as if an invisible power had suddenly bowled him over with the weight of his guilty conscience; he dropped, exhausted, onto a big slab of rock, his hands balled into fists and buried in his hair, his head propped on his knees, and he cried: “I am a miserable bastard!” His heart broke at that point and he burst into tears. It was the first time he had cried in nineteen years.

When Jean Valjean left the bishop’s, as we saw, he was in a state far beyond anything he had ever experienced till that moment. He did not recognize himself. He could not make sense of what was happening to him. He steeled himself against the old man’s angelic act and against his gentle words. “You promised me to make an honest man of yourself. It is your soul that I am buying for you; I am taking it away from the spirit of perversity, and I am giving it to the good Lord.” Those words kept coming back to him. He defended himself against such heavenly forgiveness by means of pride, which is like a stronghold of evil inside us. He felt indistinctly that the old priest’s forgiveness was the greatest assault and the most deadly attack he had ever been rocked by; that if he could resist such clemency his heart would be hardened once and for all; that if he gave in to it, he would have to give up the hate that the actions of other men had filled his heart with for so many years and which he relished; that this time, he had to conquer or be conquered and that the struggle, a colossal and decisive struggle, was now on between his own rottenness and the goodness of that man.

When Jean Valjean left the bishop’s, as we saw, he was in a state far beyond anything he had ever experienced till that moment. He did not recognize himself. He could not make sense of what was happening to him. He steeled himself against the old man’s angelic act and against his gentle words. “You promised me to make an honest man of yourself. It is your soul that I am buying for you; I am taking it away from the spirit of perversity, and I am giving it to the good Lord.” Those words kept coming back to him. He defended himself against such heavenly forgiveness by means of pride, which is like a stronghold of evil inside us. He felt indistinctly that the old priest’s forgiveness was the greatest assault and the most deadly attack he had ever been rocked by; that if he could resist such clemency his heart would be hardened once and for all; that if he gave in to it, he would have to give up the hate that the actions of other men had filled his heart with for so many years and which he relished; that this time, he had to conquer or be conquered and that the struggle, a colossal and decisive struggle, was now on between his own rottenness and the goodness of that man.

In the glimmering light of all these thoughts, he staggered like a drunk. While he was flailing about, did he have any real idea what his adventure in Digne might mean for him? Did he hear all those mysterious warning bells that alert us or jog our spirits at certain turning points in life? Was there a voice that whispered in his ear that he had just passed the most solemn moment of his destiny, that there was no longer a middle course for him; that from now on, he would either be the best of men or he would be the worst of men; that he now had to rise higher, so to speak, than the bishop or fall even lower than the galley slave; that if he wanted to be good, he had to be an angel; that if he wanted to stay bad, he had to be a monster from hell?

Here, once more, we need to ask those questions we have already asked elsewhere: Did some dim notion of all this take shape in his mind? Certainly, as we’ve said before, adversity sharpens the wits and calamity is the highest form of education; yet it is doubtful that Jean Valjean was in any state to unravel all the strands we have singled out here. If such notions occurred to him, he would have half-glimpsed them rather than clearly seen them and they would only have thrown him into a painful and very nearly agonizing crisis. When he had just got out of that ugly, dark, deforming place we call jail, the bishop had wounded his soul the way a sudden flash of blinding light would have hurt his eyes coming out of the dark. His future life, the life that opened up to him now, all pure and radiant, filled him with trembling and fear. He no longer really knew where he was. Like an owl suddenly confronted by sunrise, the convict had been dazzled and blinded by virtue.

One thing was certain, and he himself did not doubt it: that he was no longer the same man, that already everything about him had changed, and it was no longer in his power to act as though the bishop had not spoken to him, had not touched him to the quick.

In this frame of mind he had encountered Petit-Gervais and stolen his forty sous from him. Why? It was way beyond his powers to explain; was it the final effect, a last-ditch attempt, on the part of the bad thoughts that he had brought with him from jail, a lingering residue of evil impulse, a result of what is called in physics cumulative energy? It was that and it was also, perhaps, something less than that. To put it simply, it was not he who had stolen, it was not the man, it was the beast who, out of habit and instinct, had stupidly stuck its foot over the money while his mind tried to grapple with so many new and bewildering obsessions. When his mind snapped out of it and saw what the brute had done, Jean Valjean recoiled in anguish and let out a cry of horror.

The thing is—and it’s a strange phenomenon, one that could not occur outside the situation he was now in—in stealing the money from that child, he had done something he was already no longer capable of.

Be that as it may, this final bad deed had a decisive effect on him; it suddenly pierced through the chaos in his mind and cleared it, rolling the blanket of darkness to one side and making way for the light on the other; and it acted on his soul, in the state in which it found itself, the way certain chemical reactants act on a cloudy solution by precipitating one element and clarifying another.

At first, before he had time to think, lost as he was, like a drowning man clutching at straws he had tried to find the child to give him back his money; then, when he realized that this was pointless and impossible, he gave way to despair. The very moment he shouted “I am a miserable bastard!” he saw himself for what he was, and he was already so dissociated from himself that he felt he was now no more than a ghost. What he saw, in front of him, in flesh and blood, with his stick in his hand and his smock on his back and his sack filled with stolen goods over his shoulder, with his grim and granite-like face and his mind full of abominable schemes, was the hideous galley slave Jean Valjean.

Too much misery, as we have noted, had turned him into something of a visionary. And this was like a vision. He truly saw this Jean Valjean, that sinister face, before him. He was on the point of asking himself who this man was, and he was horrified.

His brain was in one of those states that are both violent and yet frighteningly calm, in which thought runs so deep it blots out reality. You no longer see the objects around you, yet you can see the shapes in your mind as though they are outside your body.

And so he contemplated himself, so to speak, face-to-face, and at the same time, through this hallucination, he saw, at a mysterious distance, a sort of light which he took at first to be a torch. Looking more closely at this light that dawned in his conscience, he saw that it had a human shape, that the torch was the bishop.

His conscience considered each of the two men in turn as they stood before him, side by side: the bishop and Jean Valjean. Any lesser person than the first would have failed to soften the second. Through one of those strange effects that are peculiar to this kind of ecstasy, the longer the trance went on, the bigger and greater the bishop grew and the more he shone resplendent in his eyes, the more Jean Valjean shrivelled and faded away. At a certain point he was no more than a shadow. Then, all of a sudden, he evaporated completely. The bishop alone remained. He flooded the entire soul of this miserable bastard with a glorious radiance.

Jean Valjean cried for a long time. He shed hot tears, he sobbed, more helpless and fragile than any woman, more terrified than any child.

While he was crying, day dawned brighter and brighter in his spirit, and it was an extraordinary light, a light at once ravishing and terrible. His past life, his initial downfall, his long atonement, his increasingly brutal outside appearance, his hardening interior, his release from custody jollied along by so many schemes of revenge, what had happened to him at the bishop’s, the last thing he had done, stealing forty sous from a child, a crime even more cowardly and monstrous for coming after the bishop’s pardon, all this came back to him clearly, but with a clarity he had never before that moment known. He looked at his life and it looked horrible to him; at his soul, and it looked revolting. And yet, a new day was dawning and its soft light was settling over his life and over his soul. He felt like he was seeing Satan in the light of paradise.

How many hours did he spend crying his heart out? What did he do when he stopped crying? Where did he go? No one ever knew. The only thing that is known, apparently, is that, that same night, the coach driver who made the Grenoble run got to Digne at around three in the morning and saw, as he drove along the street where the bishop’s residence was, a man who looked like he was praying, on his knees on the cobblestones in the shadows outside Monseigneur Bienvenu’s front door.