بخش 1 کتاب 5

BOOK FIVE

THE DESCENT

I. A HISTORY OF PROGRESS IN BLACK GLASS BEADS

BUT WHAT HAD become of the mother who, according to the people of Montfermeil, seemed to have abandoned her child? Where was she? What was she doing?

After leaving her little Cosette with the Thénardiers, she had continued on her way and come to Montreuil-sur-mer.

This was, as you will recall, in 1818.

Fantine had left her province about twelve years before and Montreuil-sur-mer had changed. While Fantine had been slowly sinking deeper and deeper into destitution, her native town had prospered.

About two years previously one of those industrial feats had been accomplished that are major events in small country communities.

This detail is critical, so we feel it might be useful to enlarge on it—we would almost go so far as to say, to dwell on it.

From time immemorial, the special industry of Montreuil-sur-mer had been the reproduction of English jet beads and the black glass beads of Germany. This industry had always been sluggish because of the high cost of the raw materials, which had a trickle-down effect on labour. At the time of Fantine’s return to Montreuil-sur-mer, an unheard-of transformation had occurred in the production of these “black goods.” Toward the end of 1815, a man, a stranger, had blown into town and set up shop, and this newcomer had had the idea of substituting Japanese gum lac, or shellac, for resin in the manufacturing process and of using metal clasps that were simply bent rather than soldered, on bracelets in particular. This tiny change had amounted to a revolution.

This tiny change had in fact reduced the cost of the raw materials so considerably that it made it possible first, to raise wages, a benefit for the whole district; second, to improve the manufacture, an advantage for the consumer; and third, to sell them more cheaply while trebling the profits, a gain for the manufacturer.

Three outcomes from one idea.

In less than three years, the author of this process had become rich, which is good, and made everyone around him rich, which is even better. He was from outside the département. No one knew where he had come from, how he had got his start, or anything much at all about him.

The story went that he had come to town with very little money in his pockets, a few hundred francs at most.

It was from this measly capital, placed in the service of one ingenious idea, made fruitful by organization and thought, that he had made his fortune and the fortune of the whole surrounding country.

When he turned up in Montreuil-sur-mer, his clothes, manners, and turn of phrase were those of a mere labourer.

It seems that, the very day he made his obscure entry into the small town of Montreuil-sur-mer, as night was closing in on a cold December day, with a knapsack on his back and a thorn stick in his hand, a great fire had just broken out in the community hall. The man had thrown himself into the blaze and, at the risk of his own life, had saved two children who turned out to belong to the captain of the gendarmerie—which meant that no one thought to ask him for his passport. From that moment on, his name was known. He called himself father Madeleine.

II. MADELEINE1

HE WAS A man of about fifty, who had an absentminded air and who was good. That was all there was to say about him.

Thanks to the rapid expansion of the industry he had so impressively restructured, Montreuil-sur-mer had become a sizeable business centre. Spain, which consumes masses of black jet, placed huge orders with him every year. Montreuil-sur-mer was soon almost on a par with London and Berlin in the volume of trade. Father Madeleine’s profits were such that, from his second year in business, he was able to build a huge factory, with two vast workshops, one for men and the other for women. Anyone who was hungry could show up and was sure of finding work and something to eat there. Father Madeleine required goodwill of the men and pure morals of the women and honesty of everyone. He had designed the workshops in order to keep the sexes separate so the women and girls could remain virtuous. On this point, he was inflexible. It was the only point on which he was more or less intolerant. He was all the more resolutely severe because the town of Montreuil-sur-mer was a garrison town and the opportunities for moral corruption there were rife. In every respect, his coming had been a blessing and his continued presence was the town’s salvation. Before father Madeleine came along, the whole district had been going to the dogs; now, everything had come alive with the invigorating life of work. A high level of trade got everything moving and affected every corner of the region. Unemployment and poverty were now unknown. No pocket was so dingy it did not hold a bit of money, no abode so poor it did not enjoy a bit of joy.

Father Madeleine gave everyone a job. He demanded only one thing: that you be an honest man! That you be an honest woman!

As we said, out of all this activity, of which he was both cause and fulcrum, father Madeleine had made his fortune, but, rather strangely in a simple businessman, that did not seem to be his main concern. It looked as though he worried a lot about others and very little about himself. In 1820, he was known to have the sum of six hundred and thirty thousand francs in an account in his name with the bank of Laffitte; but before setting aside these six hundred and thirty thousand francs, he had spent more than a million on the town and on the poor.

The hospital had been poorly endowed; he had provided ten extra beds. Montreuil-sur-mer is divided into the upper town and the lower town. The lower town, where he lived, had only one school, a nasty shack that was falling to ruins; he had built two schools, one for girls, the other for boys. From out of his own pocket, he paid the two teachers twice their paltry official salary, and one day when someone was expressing amazement over this, he said: “The two most important civil servants are the nurse and the schoolteacher.” At his own expense he had created a refuge, something then almost unknown in France, and had set up a relief fund for old and infirm workers. His manufacturing business was a hub of activity, and a new quartier with a good number of poor families had rapidly sprung up around it; he had established a free pharmacy there.

In the early days, when he was seen to be starting out, the old biddies of the town said: “There’s a man who wants to get rich quick.” When he was seen to be making the countryside rich before becoming rich himself, the same old biddies said: “That man is ambitious.” This seemed all the more likely as he was religious, and even something of a practising Catholic, which was highly regarded in those days. He went to hear low mass every Sunday. The local deputy, who could smell competition everywhere, started to fret about this religiousness before too long. The deputy had been a member of the legislative body under the empire and shared the religious notions of an Oratorian father named Fouché,2 duc d’Otrante, whose puppet and friend he had been. Behind closed doors, he gently poked fun at God. But when he saw the wealthy manufacturer Madeleine going off to the seven o’clock mass, he smelled a potential future candidate and resolved to outdo him; he took on a Jesuit confessor and went to high mass and to vespers. Ambition in those days was, almost literally, a race to the altar. The poor, as well as the good Lord, benefited from the man’s fears, for the honourable deputy also funded two beds at the hospital—which made twelve new beds in all.

But in 1819, a rumour spread around town one morning that, on the recommendation of the prefect, and in consideration of the services rendered the district, father Madeleine was to be named mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer by the king. Those who had declared the newcomer an ambitious man eagerly seized the opportunity everyone longs for to say: “There! I told you so!” All Montreuil-sur-mer was abuzz with the rumour. It was well founded. A few days later the nomination appeared in the Moniteur.3 The following day, father Madeleine declined the offer.

In that same year of 1819, the products of the new process invented by father Madeleine were featured at the Industrial Exhibition; acting on the jury’s report, the king named the inventor a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur4—thereby providing a new rumour for the small-town mill. “Well, well! So, it was the cross he was after!” Father Madeleine declined the cross.

No doubt about it, the man was an enigma. The old biddies gave up the ghost, saying: “After all, he’s a sort of adventurer.”

As we’ve seen, the whole place owed him a great deal; the poor owed him everything; he was so useful that you had to end up honouring him and he was so sweet that you had to end up loving him; his workers, especially, adored him and he bore this adoration with a sort of melancholy gravity. When he was declared to be rich, those who comprised “society” saluted him and about town he began to be called Monsieur Madeleine; his workers and the children continued to call him father Madeleine and that was the thing that most made him smile. As he became more successful, invitations rained down on him. “Society” clamoured for him. The posh little salons of Montreuil-sur-mer, which, of course, had been closed to the artisan in the early days, flung their doors open wide to the millionaire. Dozens of overtures were made to him. He declined.

Again the old biddies were not at a loss for words: “The man’s a clod, quite uneducated. No one knows where he comes from. He wouldn’t know how to conduct himself in polite society. It is by no means certain that he can read.” When they saw him making money hand over fist, they said: “The man’s a trader.” When they saw him throwing his money around, they said: “The man’s ambitious.” When they saw him rejecting honours, they said: “The man’s an adventurer.” When they saw him rejecting polite society, they said: “The man’s a brute.” In 1820, five years after he first bobbed up in Montreuil-sur-mer, what he had done for the district was so spectacular, the desire of the whole population so unanimous, that the king again named him mayor of the town. He declined once more, but the prefect resisted his refusal, all the notables came to plead with him, the people in the street implored him, everyone made such a fuss about it that he wound up accepting. It was noted that what seemed to bring him round more than anything else was the almost cranky taunt of an old woman of the people who called out to him from her front doorstep with some verve: “A good mayor is a useful thing. A person doesn’t shirk the good they can do, do they?” That marked the third phase of his rise. Father Madeleine had become Monsieur Madeleine, and Monsieur Madeleine had become Monsieur le maire.

III. SUMS DEPOSITED WITH LAFFITTE1

YET, HE HAD remained as unaffected as on his first day there regardless. He had the grey hair, the serious eyes, and the rugged complexion of a labourer and the thoughtful face of a philosopher. He normally wore a broad-brimmed hat and a long redingote of coarse woolen cloth buttoned up to the chin. He fulfilled his official duties as mayor, but beyond that, he lived a solitary life. He spoke to very few people. He shunned small talk, would offer a sidelong greeting and swiftly push on, smiled to get out of having to talk, gave to get out of having to smile. Women said of him: “What a gentle giant of a man—a real bear!” What he liked to do was roam through the fields.

He always ate alone, with a book open in front of him, reading. He had a small but well-stocked library. He loved books; books are remote but reliable friends. The more leisure he enjoyed as he grew wealthy, the more he took advantage of it to cultivate his mind, it would seem. Since he had been in Montreuil-sur-mer, it was noted that, from year to year, his language grew more refined, more discerning, and softer.

He liked to carry a gun on his walks but he rarely used it. When he did so, his aim was infallible and it frightened people. He never killed an animal that wasn’t dangerous. He never fired at any small bird.

Although he was no longer young, he was reported to be phenomenally strong. He offered to lend a hand to anyone who was in need of it, pulled up a fallen horse, freed a wheel stuck in mud, grabbed an escaped bull by the horns to stop it. His pockets were always full of coins when he went out and always empty when he returned. Whenever he passed through a village, ragged little urchins would gleefully run after him and surround him like a cloud of flies.

It was thought that he must once have enjoyed the country life, for he had all kinds of useful secrets to teach the peasants. He taught them how to destroy grain moth by spraying the granary and soaking the cracks in the floor with a solution of common salt, and how to drive away weevils by hanging flowering orviot everywhere, from the walls and rafters, in all the sheds and throughout the house. He had “recipes” for eradicating from a field rust, blight, vetches, gorse, love-lies-bleeding, and all the various parasitical herbs and grasses that live on wheat. He could defend a rabbit hutch from rats just with the smell of a little Barbary pig that he’d put in.

One day he saw the people of the district madly pulling up nettles. He looked at the heap of uprooted plants and said: “That stuff’s dead; but it’d be good if we knew how to put it to use. When nettles are young, the leaves make an excellent vegetable; when they get older, nettles produce filaments and fibers like hemp and flax. Cloth made from nettles is every bit as good as cloth made from hemp. Chopped up, nettles are good for poultry; ground, they’re good for horned animals. Nettle seeds mixed in with fodder add lustre to the animals’ coats; the root mixed with salt produces a lovely yellow dye. And it also makes excellent hay that you can reap twice. And what do nettles need? Very little soil, no maintenance, no cultivation; the only thing is, the seeds fall as they ripen and it’s hard to gather them. That’s all. With a tiny bit of effort, the nettle would be useful; if you neglect it, it becomes a pest. So then we kill it. How many men are like nettles!” After a pause, he added: “My friends, remember this: There is no such thing as a weed and no such thing as a bad man. There are only bad cultivators.” The children loved him even more because he could make fabulous little things to play with out of straw and coconut.

Whenever he saw the door of a church draped in black, he would enter; he sought out a funeral the way others seek christenings. The bereavement and suffering of others attracted him because of his great compassion; he mingled with friends in mourning, with families dressed in black, with priests wailing around a coffin. He seemed glad to take as meditative texts those funereal psalms that are full of visions of another world. With his eyes raised to the heavens, he would listen, in a sort of yearning toward all the mysteries of infinity, to those sad voices that sing on the edge of the dark abyss of death.

He performed a whole host of good deeds as secretly as other people conceal bad deeds. He would steal into houses at night and furtively climb the stairs. Some poor devil, coming back to his hovel later, would find that his door had been opened, sometimes even forced open, in his absence. The poor man would cry out: “An evildoer’s been here!” He’d go in and the first thing he would see would be a gold coin left lying on a piece of furniture. The “evildoer” who had been in was, of course, father Madeleine.

He was affable and sad. People would say: “Now there’s a rich man who doesn’t give himself airs. There’s a lucky man who doesn’t look happy.” A few claimed he was a bit of a mystery man and asserted that no one had ever been into his room, which was a real anchorite’s cell, furnished with winged hourglasses and titivated with death’s-heads and crossbones. There was so much talk of the kind that a group of sleek and cheeky young Montreuil-sur-mer girls teamed up one day and called on him, and asked him: “Monsieur le maire, do show us your room. They say it’s quite a grotto.” He smiled and showed them into this “grotto” without further ado. They soon got their comeuppance for being so curious—curiosity killed the cat, after all. It was a room furnished quite sparely with mahogany furniture, as ugly as all furniture of the kind usually is, with walls covered in cheap wallpaper. The only thing they noticed especially was two candlesticks of an old-fashioned shape standing on the mantelpiece, which looked like they were made of silver “since they bore hallmarks.” An observation replete with that small-town spirit.

This didn’t stop it being said that no one was ever allowed into the room and that it was a hermit’s cave, a sleazy den where he slept it off, a bolt-hole, a tomb.

It was also whispered that he had “immense” sums of money deposited at Laffitte, with one peculiar stipulation, which was that the money was always immediately available, so that, it was added, Monsieur Madeleine could turn up any morning at Laffitte’s, sign a receipt, and cart off his two or three million in ten minutes flat. In reality, the “two or three million” were reduced, as we mentioned, to six hundred and thirty or forty thousand francs.

IV. MONSIEUR MADELEINE IN MOURNING

AT THE BEGINNING of 1821, the newspapers announced the death of Monsieur Myriel, bishop of Digne, “nicknamed Monseigneur Bienvenu,” who passed away in the odour of sanctity at the age of eighty-two.

The bishop of Digne, to add a detail here that the papers left out, had been, by the time he died, blind for some years, and happy to be blind, since he had his sister with him.

We might just say in passing that, on this earth where nothing is perfect, being blind and being loved is one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. To constantly have at your side a woman, an unmarried woman, a sister, a wonderful person who is there because you need her and because she can’t do without you, to know that you are indispensable to the one you need, to be endlessly able to measure her affection by the amount of presence she grants you and to say to yourself, “since she devotes all her time to me, that means I have her whole heart”; to see her thoughts, if not her face, to weigh one being’s faithfulness when the rest of the world has been eclipsed, to detect the rustling of her dress as though it were the sound of wings, to hear her coming and going, going out, coming back, talking, singing, and to know you are the centre of every step she takes, of every word, of every song, to manifest your own gravitational pull every minute of the day, to feel yourself all the more powerful for your infirmity, to become in darkness, and through darkness, the star around which this angel revolves—few forms of bliss come anywhere near it! The ultimate happiness in life is the conviction that one is loved; loved for oneself—better still, loved in spite of oneself. And this conviction is what the blind have. In such distress, to be waited on is to be hugged and kissed. Is there anything the blind man is deprived of? No. Having love means not losing the light. And what love! Love entirely pure. Blindness does not exist where there is certainty. The soul gropes for another soul—and finds it. And this soul found and tried and tested is a woman. A hand supports you, it is hers; lips brush your forehead, hers; you hear breathing right next to you, it is her breathing. To have all of her, from her devotion to her sympathy, never to be abandoned, to have that sweet frailty that succours you, to lean on such an unshakable reed, to touch Providence with your own hands and hold it in your arms. God made palpable—what rapture! The heart, that dark celestial flower, bursts into mysterious bloom. You would not trade such shade for all the light in the world. The angel of the house is there, is always there; if she goes away, it is only to return; she fades like a dream only to reappear like reality. You sense her approaching, and there she is. Your cup runs over with serenity, gaiety, ecstasy; you are a beacon of light in the night. And the countless little shows of thoughtfulness! Little things that are enormous in the void. The most heavenly tones of the female voice are employed to soothe you and make up to you for the vanished universe. You are stroked with soul. You may see nothing, but you feel adored. It is a paradise of darkness.

It is from this paradise that Monseigneur Bienvenu passed into the other.

The announcement of his death was reprinted in the local Montreuil-sur-mer paper. Monsieur Madeleine appeared the next day all in black and with a black crepe band around his hat.

Monsieur Madeleine’s mourning was noted in town and chins began wagging, since it seemed to throw some light on his background. It was concluded that he must have had some connection to the venerable bishop. “He’s wearing black for the bishop of Digne,” said the drawing rooms; it elevated Monsieur Madeleine enormously and gave him, suddenly and immediately, a certain standing in the noble world of Montreuil-sur-mer. The place’s microscopic faubourg Saint-Germain1 considered ending Monsieur Madeleine’s quarantine, now that it looked as though he could very well be related to a bishop. Monsieur Madeleine realized he had been promoted by the increased curtsying on the part of the old ladies and the smiles bestowed upon him by the young ladies. One night, a doyenne of that special small world of high society, curious by right of seniority, ventured to ask: “Monsieur le maire is doubtless the cousin of the late bishop of Digne?” He said: “No, Madame.”

“But,” the dowager persisted, “you are wearing mourning for him?”

He replied: “That’s because I was one of his family’s lackeys when I was young.”

It was also noted that whenever any little homeless Savoyard came to town as he tramped around the countryside looking for chimneys to sweep, Monsieur Madeleine would send for him, ask him his name, and give him money. The little Savoyards spread the word among themselves and quite a few of them passed that way.

V. DIM FLASHES OF LIGHTNING ON THE HORIZON

LITTLE BY LITTLE, with time, all who resisted were won over. At first Monsieur Madeleine had been vilified by slander and calumny, according to a sort of universal law that all those who better themselves are subject to; then these were reduced to spiteful cracks, then they became mere malicious jokes, and then that entirely evaporated. Respect was complete, unanimous, warm, and friendly, and there came a moment, around 1821, when the words monsieur le maire were spoken in Montreuil-sur-mer in the same tone as the words monseigneur the bishop had been spoken in Digne in 1815. People came from thirty miles around to consult Monsieur Madeleine. He settled differences, prevented lawsuits, reconciled enemies. Everyone accepted him as a judge as though that were his right by innate authority. It was as though he had the book of natural law for a soul. The veneration was contagious, and in six or seven years it had spread throughout the region from one person to the next.

One man alone, in all the town and the surrounding district, was completely immune to the infection and, no matter what father Madeleine did, refused to succumb, as if a kind of instinct, incorruptible and unflinching, aroused him and gnawed at him. It does seem, indeed, that certain people are endowed with a real animal instinct, pure and intact like all instincts, that creates antipathies and affinities, that fatally divides one personality from another, that does not hesitate, that is never in doubt, is never silenced and never flags, clear in its obscurity, infallible, imperious, resistant to all the counsels of intelligence and all the solvents of reason and that, whatever their fates may be, secretly alerts the dog-man to the presence of the cat-man, and the fox-man to the presence of the lion-man.

Often, when Monsieur Madeleine was walking down the street, serene, amiable, enveloped by the blessings of all, it would happen that a tall man dressed in an iron grey redingote, armed with a big cane and wearing a hat pulled down over his face, would abruptly turn round and follow him with his eyes until he had disappeared from view, standing with crossed arms, slowly shaking his head and pushing his top lip up practically to his nose in a sort of meaningful grimace that might be translated as: “What is it about that man, I wonder? … I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere before … In any case, he still doesn’t fool me.” This character, grave with an intense gravity that was practically a threat, was one of those people who worry the observer, even if you only catch sight of them for a few seconds.

His name was Javert and he was with the police.

He performed, in Montreuil-sur-mer, the unpleasant but useful job of inspector. He had not seen Madeleine’s debut. Javert owed the position he occupied to the protection of Monsieur Chabouillet, the secretary of the minister of state, Comte Anglès, then prefect of police in Paris. When Javert arrived in Montreuil-sur-mer, the fortune of the great manufacturer had already been made and father Madeleine had become Monsieur Madeleine.

Certain police officers have a special physiognomy made complex by the blend of apparent meanness with apparent authority. Javert had such a physiognomy, minus the meanness.

It is our conviction that if souls were visible to the naked eye, we would clearly see the strange phenomenon whereby every individual member of the human race corresponds to one of the species of the animal kingdom; and we would easily recognize this truth, scarcely entertained by the theorists, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the pig to the tiger, all animals are in man and each of them is in a man—sometimes even several of them simultaneously.

Animals are nothing more than the forms our virtues and our vices take, trotting around before our very eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God reveals them to us to give us pause for thought. Only, since animals are mere shadows, God has not made them educable in the complete sense of the word. What would be the point? On the contrary, our souls being what is real and having a purpose unique to themselves, God has endowed them with intelligence, that is, the possibility of being educated. Public education, when it is good, can always bring out the latent usefulness of a soul, no matter what it is like to start with.

This is said, of course, from the limited point of view of life on earth as we know it, and without wishing to prejudge the profound question of the past and future personalities of beings that are not human. The visible self in no way gives the theorist authority to deny the latent self. These reservations having been made, we can now move on.

But if you will just bear with us a moment longer and accept that there is in every human being one of the species of the animals of creation, it will be easy for us to say exactly what this officer of the peace, Javert, was.

The Asturian peasants are convinced that in every litter of wolves there is one pup who is killed by the mother because otherwise it would grow up to devour all the other pups.

Give that male wolf puppy a human face, and you’d have Javert.

Javert was born in prison to a fortune-teller who read the cards and whose husband was serving time in the galleys. As he was growing up, he felt as though he were on the outside of society and despaired of ever getting in. He noticed that society kept at bay two classes of men, those who attack it and those who guard it; his only choice was between those two classes. At the same time, he felt in himself some kind of basic rigidity, steadiness, honesty, clouded by an inexpressible hatred for that race of bohemians to whom he belonged. He joined the police.

He did well there. At the age of forty, he was an inspector.

As a young man he had been stationed as a warden in the galleys of the south.

Before moving on to better things, let’s be clear about the term human face, which we applied a moment ago to Javert.

The human face of Javert consisted of a pug nose, with two wide nostrils toward which two enormous sideburns climbed across his cheeks. You felt disconcerted the first time you set eyes on these two forests flanking those two cavernous holes. When Javert laughed, which was rare and terrible, his thin lips parted and revealed not only his teeth but his gums, and a line appeared around his nose that was as flat and feral as on the muzzle of one of the big cats. When Javert was serious, he was a mastiff; when he laughed, he was a tiger. For the rest, not much of a skull, a lot of jaw, hair that hid his forehead and fell into his eyes, a permanent frown line between his eyes like a star of anger, a dark glance, a pinched and formidable mouth, a ferocious air of command.

This man was composed of two sentiments, very simple and very good in themselves, relatively speaking, but which he made almost bad by exaggeration: respect for authority, and hatred of revolt; and in his eyes, theft, murder, all crimes, were just different forms of revolt. He wrapped up in a sort of blind and deep faith anyone serving some kind of function within the state apparatus, from the prime minister to the village cop. He heaped contempt, aversion, and disgust on anyone who had once crossed the legal divide into wrongdoing, who even once overstepped the bounds of the law. He was an absolutist and would brook no exceptions. On the one hand, he would say, “A public servant can’t be deceived; a magistrate is never wrong.” On the other, he would say, “That other lot are irredeemably lost. No good can come of them.” He fully shared the opinion of those extremists who attribute to human law some kind of power to damn or, if you prefer, to record the damned, and who place a kind of Styx1 at the bottom of society. He was stoical, serious, austere, a gloom-filled dreamer; humble and haughty like all fanatics. His stare was a corkscrew. It was cold and piercing. His whole life was expressed by two words: watching and waiting. He had drawn a straight line through what is most tortuous about the world; his conscience was completely bound up with his usefulness, his public role was his religion, and he was a spy by vocation the same way others are priests. Woe to anyone who should fall into his clutches! He would have arrested his own father if the man were breaking out of jail and denounced his own mother if she were returning illegally from banishment. And he would have done it with the sort of inner satisfaction virtue provides. On top of all that, a life of deprivation, isolation, self-denial, chastity, never a moment’s fun. It was all implacable duty, policing seen the way the Spartans saw Sparta, with a merciless vigilance, a ferocious honesty—a snitch carved in marble, Brutus meets Vidocq.2 Javert’s whole person screamed spy—and an underhand spy at that. The mystical school of Joseph de Maistre,3 which, at the time, spiced up what were known as the “ultra”—ultra-royalist—newspapers4 with highfalutin cosmogony, would not have failed to claim Javert as a symbol. You could not see his forehead, which was hidden under his hat, you could not see his eyes, which were buried under his eyebrows, you could not see his chin, which was plunged into his cravat, you could not see his hands, which were retracted into his sleeves, you could not see his walking stick, which he carried under his redingote. But when the occasion arose, you would suddenly see springing out of all that shadow, as though from an ambush, a bony narrow forehead, a forlorn gaze, a threatening chin, enormous hands, and a monstrous knobby cudgel.

In his rare spare time, although he hated books, he would read; the result was that he was not altogether illiterate. This could be gauged by a certain emphasis in his speech.

He had no vices whatsoever, as we said. When he was pleased with himself, he allowed himself a pinch of tobacco. That is the thread by which he hung on to humanity.

No wonder Javert was the terror of that whole class of people listed in the annual statistics of the Ministry of Justice under the heading: Gens sans aveu—“People of no fixed abode”—vagrants. They scuttled at the mere mention of the name Javert; Javert’s face appeared to petrify them.

So that is the formidable man we are dealing with.

Javert was like an eye forever fixed on Monsieur Madeleine. An eye full of suspicion and conjecture. Monsieur Madeleine ended up becoming aware of this, but it seemed beneath his notice. He never questioned Javert, neither sought him out nor avoided him; he simply endured this annoying and almost heavy scrutiny, without appearing to give it a moment’s thought. He treated Javert like everyone else, with courtesy and kindness.

From something Javert let slip, it was clear he’d done some secret research, with an inquisitiveness in keeping with the breed and having as much to do with instinct as with any deliberate intention, sniffing out any former traces that father Madeleine might have left behind elsewhere. He appeared to know, and sometimes covertly suggested, that someone had gathered certain information in a certain part of the country about a certain family that had disappeared. Once he happened to say while talking to himself: “I think I’ve got him!” After which he sat brooding for three days without saying a word. It seems the thread he thought he held had snapped.

However—and this is a necessary qualification regarding the meaning certain words might convey in too absolute a manner—there can be nothing truly infallible in a human being, and the peculiarity of instinct is precisely its capacity for being clouded, thrown off scent, led astray. And if this were not the case, instinct would be superior to intelligence and the beast would turn out to be more enlightened than man.

Javert was obviously somewhat disconcerted by Monsieur Madeleine’s complete insouciance and tranquillity.

But one day, his own strange manner appeared to attract Monsieur Madeleine’s attention. And this was the occasion.

VI. FATHER FAUCHELEVENT

MONSIEUR MADELEINE WAS WALKING along an unpaved alleyway one morning in Montreuil-sur-mer. He heard a noise and saw a group some distance away. He went over to them. An old man known as father Fauchelevent had just fallen under his cart when his horse fell.

This Fauchelevent was one of the rare enemies Monsieur Madeleine still had at the time. When Madeleine had popped up in the area, Fauchelevent, a former scrivener and peasant who was almost literate, had a business that was going bad. Fauchelevent watched this simple labourer getting rich while he, a legal professional, was going broke. The sight filled him with jealousy and he had done everything he could to hurt Madeleine. Then the old man had gone bankrupt and he no longer had anything but a horse and a cart to his name; being without family and without children, he had turned himself into a cart driver in order to survive.

The horse had broken both hind legs and could not get up. The old man was stuck between the wheels. The fall was such a bad one that his chest was taking the whole weight of the cart. The cart was loaded to the brim. Father Fauchelevent was letting out awful rattling noises. They tried to pull him out from under, but in vain. Any badly thought-out attempt, any clumsy bid to assist, any wrong move could easily finish him off. It was impossible to extricate him other than by lifting the cart from below. Javert, who had surged up out of nowhere the moment the accident occurred, had sent for a jack.

Monsieur Madeleine arrived on the scene. People made way for him out of respect.

“Help!” shrieked old Fauchelevent. “Who’s the good lad who’ll save an old man’s life?”

Monsieur Madeleine turned to the onlookers: “Anyone got a jack?”

“Someone’s gone to get one,” replied a peasant.

“How long will it take?”

“They went to the nearest place, at Flachot’s corner, where there’s a smithy. But it’ll still take a good quarter of an hour.”

“A quarter of an hour!” cried Madeleine.

It had rained the day before, the ground was soaked, the cart was sinking deeper into the ground every second and crushing the old cart driver’s chest more and more. It was obvious that his ribs would crack before another five minutes were up.

“We haven’t got a quarter of an hour,” said Madeleine to the peasants looking on.

“Nothing else for it!”

“But we don’t have time! Can’t you see the cart’s sinking fast?”

“Jesus!”

“Listen,” Madeleine went on. “There’s still enough space under the cart for a man to slide under and lift it on his back. It’ll only take half a minute and we’ll pull the poor man out. Is there anyone here who’s got the back and the heart for it? Five gold louis to be gained!” No one in the group moved.

“Ten louis,”1 said Madeleine.

The crowd stared at the ground. Someone murmured: “You’d have to be as strong as the devil. And you’d risk being crushed to a pulp, to boot!” “Come on!” said Madeleine. “Twenty louis.”

Same silence.

“It’s not that they don’t want to,” a voice piped up.

Monsieur Madeleine wheeled round and recognized Javert. He had not seen him when he arrived. Javert continued: “It’s the strength. You’d have to be a monster of a man to lift a cart like that on your back.” Then, not taking his eyes off Madeleine for a second, he went on, stressing each and every word he uttered: “Monsieur Madeleine, I have only ever known one man capable of doing what you’re asking here.” Madeleine flinched.

Javert persisted with an air of indifference but still not taking his eyes off Madeleine.

“He was a convict.”

“Ah!” said Madeleine.

“From the jail in Toulon.”

Madeleine went pale. But the cart went on slowly sinking. Father Fauchelevent gasped and screamed:

“I can’t breathe! It’s breaking my ribs! A jack! Something! Aaagh!”

Madeleine looked around.

“So no one here wants to earn twenty louis and save this poor old man’s life?”

Not one of the bystanders stirred. Javert repeated: “I’ve only ever known one man who could stand in for a jack. And it was that convict.” “Ah! It’s crushing me!” screamed the old man.

Madeleine raised his head, met the falcon eye of Javert still fixed on him, looked at the paralyzed peasants and gave a sad little smile. Then, without saying a word, he fell on his knees, and before the crowd even had time to let out a cry, he was underneath the cart.

There was a frightening moment of suspense and silence.

Madeleine, lying almost flat on his stomach, was seen trying twice, in vain, to bring his elbows and knees closer together. The crowd shouted at him: “Father Madeleine! Get out of there!” Old Fauchelevent himself said to him: “Monsieur Madeleine! Get away! The jig’s up for me, you can see that! Let me be! You’ll get yourself crushed, too!” Madeleine did not respond.

The onlookers were breathless with emotion. The wheels had continued to sink, and it was already almost impossible for Madeleine to get out from under the carriage.

All of a sudden the enormous mass was seen to wobble, the cart slowly rose up, the wheels came halfway out of the rut. A strangled voice was heard crying out: “Hurry up! Help me!” Madeleine made one last supreme effort.

Everyone rushed forward. One man’s devotion had given courage and strength to all. The cart was lifted by ten pairs of arms. Old Fauchelevent was saved.

Madeleine straightened up. He was white, though dripping with sweat. His clothes were torn and covered in mud. Everyone was in tears. The old man kissed his knees and called him the good Lord. The man himself had the strangest expression on his face, a kind of deliriously happy pain, and he fixed his gaze calmly on Javert, who was still watching him like a hawk.

VII. FAUCHELEVENT BECOMES A GARDENER IN PARIS

FAUCHELEVENT HAD THROWN his kneecap out of joint in his fall. Father Madeleine had him carried to an infirmary that he had set up for his workers in the same building as his factory and that was serviced by two Sisters of Charity. The following morning, the old man found a thousand-franc note on the night table by his bed, with these words written in father Madeleine’s hand: “I’m buying your horse and cart.” The cart was smashed and the horse was dead. Fauchelevent recovered but his knee remained stiff. Monsieur Madeleine, through the recommendations of the sisters and his priest, found the old codger a job as a gardener in a convent in the Saint-Antoine quartier of Paris.1 A little while after this, Monsieur Madeleine was appointed mayor. The first time Javert saw Monsieur Madeleine sporting the sash that conferred all authority over the town, he felt a shudder run through him the way a bull mastiff would do if he scented a wolf underneath his master’s clothing. From that moment on, he avoided him as much as he could. When the requirements of the job made it absolutely necessary and there was no way he could avoid finding himself face-to-face with the mayor, he addressed him with profound respect.

Apart from the visible signs we’ve mentioned, the prosperity father Madeleine had created in Montreuil-sur-mer had another symptom that, though not visible, was no less significant. This one is absolutely unmistakable. When the populace is hurting, when there isn’t enough work, when business drops off, the taxpayer balks at paying taxes out of penury, exhausts and exceeds deadlines, and the government spends a lot of money on the legal costs of tax collection and recovery. When there is abundant work, when a region is happy and rich, taxes are easily paid and cost the government very little to collect. We might say that public poverty and wealth have an infallible barometer—the cost of tax collection. In seven years, the cost of tax collection had gone down by 75 percent in the arrondissement of Montreuil-sur-mer, which caused this arrondissement to become a general reference point, frequently cited by Monsieur de Villèle,2 the then minister of finance.

So this was the situation when Fantine went back to her hometown. No one remembered her anymore. But happily the door of Monsieur Madeleine’s factory was like the face of a friend. She applied and was accepted in the women’s workshop. The work was entirely new to Fantine, she could not be expected to be particularly good at it, and she made very little as a result for a day’s work, but it was enough in the end, the problem was solved, she was earning her living.

VIII. MADAME VICTURNIEN SPENDS THIRTY-FIVE FRANCS ON MORALITY

WHEN FANTINE SAW she was making a living, she had a moment of sheer exhilaration. To live honestly by your labour, that was a blessing from above! A genuine love of work came back to her. She bought a mirror, delighted in gazing in it at her youthfulness, her beautiful hair and her beautiful teeth, forgot much, dreamed only of Cosette and of the possibilities the future held, and was very nearly happy. She rented a small room and furnished it on credit from her future labour—a vestige of her old spendthrift habits.

Not being able to say she was married, she was very careful, as we have already hinted, not to mention her little girl.

At the start, as we saw, she paid the Thénardiers punctually. As she only knew how to sign her name, she was obliged to use a public letter-writer to write to them.

She wrote often. This did not go unnoticed. They began to whisper in the women’s workshop that Fantine “wrote letters” and that she was “stuck-up.” No one pries as effectively into other people’s business as those whose business it most definitely is not. “Why does that gentleman only ever come at dusk?” “Why doesn’t what’s-his-name ever hang his keys on the hook on Thursdays?” “Why does she always take the backstreets?” “Why does Madame always get out of her fiacre before it drives into her yard?” “Why does she send someone out for a block of writing paper when she has loads of stationery in the house?” And so on and so forth. There are beings who, to find the answer to such teasing riddles, about which, furthermore, they don’t actually give a fig, spend more money, devote more time, go to much more trouble than ten good deeds would require; and do so gratuitously, just for the hell of it, without being rewarded for their curiosity except by curiosity itself. They will follow this or that person for days at a time, while away the hours loitering on sundry street corners, under the arches of passageways, at night, in the cold and the rain, bribe desk attendants, get coach drivers and lackeys roaring drunk, buy off a chambermaid, put a porter in their pocket. What for? For nothing. For the sake of finding out, knowing, penetrating the mystery. Out of an itching need to be able to tell. And often, once these secrets are out, the mysteries broadcast, the enigmas exposed to the light of day, they lead to catastrophe, duels, bankruptcies, ruined families, shattered existences—to the great joy of those who “got to the bottom of it all” for no apparent reason and through sheer instinct. Sad.

Some people are malicious out of a simple need to have something to say. Their conversation, parlour talk, antechamber gossip, is reminiscent of those fireplaces that swiftly go through the wood—they need a lot of fuel, and the fuel is their neighbour.

So Fantine was observed.

On top of that, there was more than one woman who was jealous of her blond hair and her white teeth.

It was noted that in the middle of the workshop floor, she would often turn away and wipe a tear. Those were moments when she was thinking of her child; perhaps also of the man she had once loved.

Breaking the mournful ties of the past is hard and painful work.

It was noted that she wrote, at least twice a month, always to the same address, and that the postage was prepaid. The address was finally gleaned: Monsieur Thénardier, Innkeeper, Montfermeil. The public letter-writer, an old geezer who could not get his fill of red wine without emptying secrets out of his pockets, was made to spill the beans down at the tavern. In a word, Fantine was known to have a child. “It seems to be a daughter of some kind.” One old crone did the trip to Montfermeil, spoke to Thénardier, and crowed on her return: “It may have cost me thirty-five francs but I got my money’s worth. I saw the child!” The windbag who did this was a gorgon known as Madame Victurnien, guardian and keeper of universal virtue. Madame Victurnien was fifty-six years old and wore the mask of age over her mask of ugliness. Her voice was querulous and her mind leaped about like a flea. This old woman had once been young, unbelievable as that was. In her youth, smack bang in the middle of ‘93, she had married a monk who’d escaped from the cloister in a red cap and switched from the Bernardins to the Jacobins.1 Dried-up, bitter, cantankerous, shrill, prickly, virtually poisonous, she lived off memories of her monk, who was now dead, and who had ruled her with an iron fist and broken her. She was a nettle that you could see had been trampled by the passing monk. When the Restoration came, she turned herself into a bigot2 and with such verve that the priests forgave her her monk. She had a small property, which she had made a great song and dance about bequeathing to some religious community or other. She was highly regarded by the bishop of Arras. So this Madame Victurnien went to Montfermeil and came back telling anyone who’d listen: “I saw the child.” All this took time. Fantine had been at the factory for over a year when, one morning, the overseer of the workshop handed her fifty francs on behalf of Monsieur le maire, told her that she was no longer part of the factory, and requested her, on behalf of Monsieur le maire, to kindly leave the district.

This was precisely the same month that the Thénardiers, having demanded twelve francs instead of six, had just upped it to fifteen francs instead of twelve.

Fantine was floored. She couldn’t leave the district, she owed money for her rent and her furniture. Fifty francs was not enough to pay back her debts. She stammered some words of entreaty. The overseer indicated to her that she had to clear out of the workshop pronto. In any case, Fantine was a fairly average worker. Overwhelmed with shame even more than despair, she left the workshop and went back to her room. Her sin, clearly, was now known to all!

She no longer felt she had the strength to say a word in her own defence. She was advised to go and see Monsieur le maire but she did not dare. Monsieur le maire had given her fifty francs because he was good, he was driving her away because he was just. She bowed to that ruling.

IX. MADAME VICTURNIEN’S SUCCESS

SO, THE MONK’S widow was good for something.

Monsieur Madeleine had known nothing of all this. It was one of those combinations of events life is full of. Monsieur Madeleine virtually never set foot in the women’s workshop. He had put an old maid the curé had passed on to him in charge of it and had complete confidence in this overseer, an impeccably respectable person, firm, fair, full of the charity that consists in giving, but not so full of the charity that consists in understanding and forgiving. Monsieur Madeleine left everything up to her. The best of men are sometimes forced to delegate their authority. It was in this absolute capacity and with the conviction that she was doing the right thing that the overseer had prepared the case for the prosecution, tried, condemned, and executed Fantine.

As for the fifty francs, she had taken them from a fund Monsieur Madeleine had entrusted to her for alms for the poor and for the relief of workers and which she did not have to account for.

Fantine offered her services as domestic help, going from house to house. Nobody wanted her. She had not been able to leave town. The secondhand dealer she owed money to for her furniture—some furniture!—had said to her: “If you try to sneak off, I’ll have you arrested as a thief.” The landlord she owed money to for her rent had said to her: “You’re young and pretty, I’m sure you can pay.” She divided the fifty francs between the landlord and the secondhand dealer, gave the dealer back three quarters of the furniture, keeping only what was strictly necessary, and found herself without a job, without social standing, with nothing more than her bed and still owing about a hundred francs.

She began to sew heavy-duty shirts as piecework for the soldiers in the garrison and made twelve sous a day.1 Her daughter cost her ten. It was at this point that she began to fall behind in payments to the Thénardiers.

But an old woman who lit her candle for her when she came home at night taught her the art of living in destitution. Beyond living on little, there is living on nothing. These are two rooms; the first is dark, the second is black.

Fantine learned how you go completely without heat in winter, how you get rid of a bird who eats a farthing’s worth of millet every other day, how you turn your petticoat into your blanket and your blanket into your petticoat, how you save your candle by eating by the light of the window across the way. No one knows how much certain enfeebled beings, who have grown old in deprivation, and honest deprivation at that, can get out of a sou. It ends up being a skill. Fantine acquired this sublime skill and with it got back a bit of her old courage.

At that time, she said to a neighbour: “Bah! I tell myself that by only sleeping five hours a day and working the rest of the time on my sewing, I’ll always just about earn my daily bread. And then again, when you’re sad, you don’t eat as much. So, misery, worry, a bit of bread here, a bit of heartache there, it all keeps me going.” In such distress, to have had her little girl with her would have been a strange joy. She thought of sending for her. Christ! Make her share in her destitution! And then, she still owed the Thénardiers money! How could she pay? And what about the trip! How could she pay for that?

The old woman who had given her what we might call lessons in the art of poverty was a pious old maid named Marguerite, who was devout in the good sense of the term, poor and charitable toward the poor and even toward the rich, and who knew just enough to be able to sign “Margeritte,” and believed in God, which is the trick.

These virtuous souls exist abundantly here below; one day they will be on high. Their lives have a sequel.

At first, Fantine was so ashamed, she didn’t dare leave the house.

Whenever she was in the street, she felt people looking back at her and pointing her out; everyone stared at her and no one greeted her; the sour and chilling contempt of those she passed cut into her flesh and into her soul, cut her to the quick like an icy blast.

In small towns, a woman down on her luck is naked before the sarcastic remarks and curiosity of all and sundry. In Paris, at least, no one knows who you are and this anonymity cloaks you. Oh, how she wished she could get to Paris! Not possible.

Obviously she would have to get used to disrespect just as she had got used to poverty. Little by little she learned how to make the most of it. After two or three months she managed to shake off the shame and started going out again as though she thought nothing of it.

“I don’t give a damn,” she said.

She came and went, head held high, with a bitter smile on her lips as she felt herself becoming shameless.

Madame Victurnien sometimes saw her going by her window, noticed the distress of “that creature,” “put in her place” thanks to her, and was very pleased with herself. Nasty people enjoy a grim satisfaction.

Fantine was working herself into the ground and the slight dry cough she suffered from got worse. She sometimes said to her neighbour Marguerite: “Just feel how hot my hands are.” Yet of a morning, when, with an old broken comb, she combed her beautiful hair that streamed down like threads of silk, she would enjoy a moment of happy vanity.

X. CONTINUED SUCCESS

SHE HAD BEEN fired toward the end of winter; summer came and went and winter returned. Short days mean less work. In winter, no heat, no light, no midday, night meets day, fog, twilight, the window is grey, you can’t see out properly. The sky is a basement window. The whole day is a cellar. The sun looks like a pauper. Ghastly season! Winter turns the water of the heavens and the heart of man to stone. Her creditors were harassing her.

Fantine did not earn enough. Her debts had mushroomed. The Thénardiers, not getting regular payments, bombarded her with letters the contents of which distressed her and the postage costs of which were ruining her.1 One day they wrote to tell her that her little Cosette was quite naked in the freezing cold they were having, that she needed a woolen skirt and that the mother would have to send at least ten francs to cover the cost. She accepted the letter and carried it around in her hand all day, screwed into a ball. That evening she went to a barber’s shop at the end of the street and took the comb out of her hair. Her wondrous blond locks tumbled down to the small of her back.

“What beautiful hair!” the barber cried.

“How much will you give me for it?” she asked.

“Ten francs.”

“Cut it off.”

She bought a knitted skirt and sent it to the Thénardiers.

The skirt made the Thénardiers furious. It was the money they wanted. They gave the skirt to Éponine. The poor little Lark went on freezing.

Fantine thought: “My little girl is warm now. I’ve dressed her with my hair.” She wore little round caps that hid her shaved head and still looked pretty.

A gloomy travail was being accomplished in Fantine’s heart. When she saw that she no longer had hair to do up, she began to hate everything and everyone around her. She had long shared the universal veneration for father Madeleine; yet, by dint of repeating to herself that it was he who had sent her packing and that he was the cause of her plight, she wound up hating him, too, especially him. Whenever she passed by the factory at times when the workers were hanging around the doors, she would put on an act, laughing and singing.

An old factory woman who saw her laughing and singing like this one day said: “There’s a girl who’s headed for the rocks.”

She picked up a man, the first man who happened along, a man she did not love, out of bravado, with rage in her heart. He was a miserable wretch, some sort of mendicant street musician, a lazy thug who beat her up and dumped her just as she had picked him up, in disgust.

She worshipped her daughter.

The lower she sank, the bleaker everything around her became, the more this sweet little angel shone in her heart of hearts. She would say: “When I’m rich, I’ll have my Cosette with me.” And she would laugh. The cough never left her and she had terrible night sweats.

One day she received a letter from the Thénardiers that went like this: “Cosette is sick from an epidemic that’s going round the countryside. They call it miliary fever. She needs expensive drugs. It’s costing us a fortune. If you don’t send forty francs before the end of a week, the little one will be dead.” She burst out laughing hysterically and said to her old neighbour: “Hah! They’re too much! Forty francs! That’s all! That’s two napoléons!2 Where do they think I’m going to get them? Are they crazy, these damned peasants?” Yet she climbed up the stairs to where there was a bull’s-eye window and reread the letter. Then she came back downstairs and ran out of the house leaping and laughing still. Someone who ran into her said: “What have you got to be so happy about, then?” She replied: “Some hayseeds just sent me a tremendous joke. They’re asking for forty francs. What peasants!”

As she was crossing the square, she saw a crowd gathered around a weird-looking carriage on the top of which a man dressed entirely in red was holding forth. He was a tumbler and travelling dentist on tour and he was offering the public complete sets of dentures, opiates, powders, and elixirs. Fantine mingled with the crowd and started laughing like everyone else at the man’s harangue, which combined slang for the rabble and jargon for the better class of person. The tooth-puller spotted this beautiful girl laughing and suddenly belted out: “You have very nice teeth, you, that girl laughing there. Sell me your two cutters and I’ll give you a gold napoléon for each one.” “What’s that, my two cutters?” asked Fantine.

“Cutters,” said the professor of dentistry, “that’s your two front teeth, the upper ones.”

“How horrible!” cried Fantine.

“Two napoléons,” growled an old toothless hag who was there. “It’s all right for some!”

Fantine fled and covered her ears so she wouldn’t hear the hoarse voice of the man shouting at her back: “Think about it, sweetheart! Two napoléons, that could come in handy. If your heart says yes, be there tonight at the Tillac d’Argent Inn; that’s where you’ll find me.” Fantine went home. She was furious and told her kind neighbour Marguerite all about it.

“Can you imagine? What kind of creep would say a thing like that? How can they let men like that travel around the country? Pull out my two front teeth! But I’d look hideous! Your hair grows back, but your teeth! Ah, what a monster of a man! I’d rather throw myself headfirst onto the pavement from the fifth floor! He reckoned he’d be at the Tillac d’Argent tonight.” “And what was he offering?” asked Marguerite.

“Two napoléons.”

“That’s forty francs.”

“Yes,” said Fantine, “that’s forty francs.”

She thought for a moment and resumed her sewing. After fifteen minutes, she dropped the sewing and went to reread the Thénardiers’ letter on the stairs.

When she came back, she said to Marguerite, who was working next to her: “So what is miliary fever, anyway? Do you have any idea?”

“Yes,” replied the old maid, “it’s a disease.”

“Do you need to take a lot of drugs for it?”

“Oh, terrible drugs.”

“Where does it affect you?”

“It just happens, like that.”

“Do children get it?”

“Children especially.”

“Do you die of it?”

“Very often.”

Fantine left the room and went to read the letter one more time on the stairs.

That night she went downstairs and could be seen heading off down the rue de Paris where the inns are.

The next morning, as Marguerite came into Fantine’s room before daybreak, for they always worked together and so could share the one candle between the two of them, she found Fantine sitting on her bed, pale, icy cold. She had not been to bed. Her cap had fallen to her knees. The candle had been burning all night and was very nearly burned out.

Marguerite stopped at the door, petrified by the sight of this overwhelming chaos, and cried out: “Lord! The candle’s all burned! Something terrible’s happened!” Then she looked at Fantine, who turned her hairless head toward her.

Fantine had aged ten years overnight.

“Jesus!” said Marguerite. “What’s wrong with you, Fantine?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” replied Fantine. “On the contrary, now my little girl won’t die of that terrible disease, for lack of help. I’m happy.” As she spoke, she showed the old maid two napoléons gleaming on the table.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” said Marguerite. “But that’s a small fortune! Where did you get these gold louis?”

“I got them,” replied Fantine.

And with that, she smiled. The candle lit her face. It was a bloody smile. Reddish saliva besmirched the corners of her mouth and inside her mouth was a black hole.

The two teeth had been ripped out. She sent the forty francs to Montfermeil. But it was only a trick of the Thénardiers to get more money. Cosette was not sick at all.

Fantine threw her mirror out the window. Long before this she had vacated her cell on the second floor for an attic beneath the roof that had a simple latch for a lock; one of those garrets where the ceiling forms an angle with the floor and you bang your head on it every time you move. A poor person can only get to the back of their room, as to the end of their destiny, by stooping lower and lower. She no longer had a bed, all she had left was a rag she called her bedspread, a mattress on the floor, and a chair with the cane seat missing. A small rosebush sat dried out in a corner, forgotten. In the other corner was a butter pot for water—which froze in winter, the different levels of water remaining for a long time marked by rings of ice. She had already lost all sense of shame, she now lost all vanity. A sure sign of the end. She went out with filthy caps. Either from lack of time or from indifference she no longer mended her linen. When she wore holes in the heels of her stockings, she would simply stuff the stockings down into her shoes. You could tell by the perpendicular wrinkles. She patched her old, worn corset together with pieces of calico that tore at the slightest movement. The people she owed money to made scenes and never let her alone. She would stumble across them in the street, she would stumble into them again on her stairs. She spent nights crying and worrying. Her eyes were very glassy yet she felt a persistent pain in her shoulder, near the top of the left shoulder blade. She coughed a lot. She hated father Madeleine from the depths of her heart and never complained—about him or to him. She sewed seventeen hours a day; but a prison contractor who was putting female prisoners to work for a pittance suddenly dropped the prices, which reduced the day’s pickings for free labourers to nine sous. Seventeen hours of work for nine sous a day! Her creditors were even more merciless than ever. The secondhand dealer, who had taken back nearly all the furniture, kept plaguing her: “When are you going to pay me, you tart?” What did they expect her to do, for God’s sake? She felt hounded and something of the wild beast took shape inside her. At about the same time, old man Thénardier wrote to her that, really, he had waited far too long out of the goodness of his heart and that he must have a hundred francs immediately; otherwise, he’d show little Cosette the door, convalescing as she still was from her great illness—throw her out on the street, in the cold, let her fend for herself and she could drop dead if that’s what she wanted to do. “A hundred francs,” mused Fantine. “But is there anywhere on earth where you can earn a hundred sous a day?” “Get on with it, then!” she said. “Let’s sell what’s left.”

The poor girl made herself a whore.

XI. CHRISTUS NOS LIBERAVIT1

WHAT IS THIS story of Fantine all about? It is about society buying itself a slave.

Who from? From destitution.

From hunger, from cold, from loneliness, from abandonment, from dire poverty. A painful bargain. A soul for a bit of bread. Destitution makes an offer, society gives the nod.

The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it has not yet managed to permeate it. They say slavery has vanished from European civilization. That is wrong. It still exists, but it now preys only on women, and it goes by the name of prostitution.

It preys on women, meaning on grace, on weakness, on beauty, on the maternal. It is not the least of man’s shameful secrets.

At the point we have reached in this doleful drama, there is nothing left of the Fantine of the past. In becoming trash she turned to marble. Whoever touches her feels cold. She wafts into view, she goes along with you yet knows nothing about you; she is the face of dishonour and severity. Life and the social order have had their final say. All that can happen has happened to her. She has felt everything, accepted everything, experienced everything, suffered everything, lost everything, cried over everything. She is resigned with a resignation that resembles indifference just as death resembles sleep. Nothing is too awful for her now. She fears nothing. Let the sky fall on her head, let the whole ocean crash over her! What does she care? She is a sponge already completely soaked.

That, at least, is what she believes, but it is a mistake to imagine that you can exhaust fate or that you ever hit rock bottom—in anything.

Alas! What are all these lives driven willy-nilly? Where are they going? Why are they like this?

He who knows the answer to that, sees the darkness as a whole.

He is alone. His name is God.

XII. THE IDLENESS OF MONSIEUR BAMATABOIS

IN ALL SMALL towns, and in Montreuil-sur-mer in particular, there is a class of young men who eat into their fifteen hundred livres in provincial income with the same cavalier attitude with which their peers in Paris devour two hundred thousand francs a year. These are beings from the great neutered species; geldings, parasites, nonentities, who have a bit of land, a bit of giddiness, and a bit of wit, who would be hicks in a salon and think themselves gentlemen in a barroom, who talk about “my acreage, my woods, my peasants,” hiss and boo actresses at the theatre to prove they are men of taste, pick fights with officers of the garrison to show they are men of war, hunt, smoke, yawn, drink, sniff tobacco, play billiards, ogle travellers alighting from the coach, live at the café, dine at the inn, have a dog who gobbles up the bones under the table and a mistress who slaps down dishes on top of it, hang on to their loose change for dear life, go overboard for whatever is in fashion, admire tragedy, despise women, wear out their old boots, ape London via Paris and Paris via Pont-à-Mousson, lose their marbles with age, never lift a finger to work, don’t do any good and don’t do much harm, either.

Monsieur Félix Tholomyès, if he had remained in his neck of the woods and never seen Paris, would have been such a man.

Any richer and you’d call them dandies; any poorer and you’d call them layabouts. They are quite simply the idle. Among the idle, there are those who are bores, those who are bored, daydreamers, and a few jokers.

In those days, a dandy was put together with a big collar, a big cravat, a watch dangling charms, three different coloured waistcoats worn one on top of the other, with the red and blue on the inside, and then an olive-coloured short-waisted jacket with tails and with a double row of silver buttons tightly buttoned right up to the shoulder, and lighter olive trousers, decorated at both seams with ribs of a random, but always odd, number, ranging from one to eleven, that limit never being exceeded. Add to that little boots with little iron caps on the heels, a narrow-brimmed top hat, hair worn in a tuft, an enormous cane, and conversation spiced with the puns of Potier. Crowning all, spurs and a moustache. In those days, a moustache was the mark of a man about town and spurs signified a pedestrian.

The provincial dandy wore longer spurs and a friskier moustache.

Those were the days of the struggle of the South American republics against the king of Spain, of Bolívar against Morillo.1 Narrow-brimmed hats were worn by royalists and were known as morillos; the liberals wore wide-brimmed hats called bolivars.

And so, eight or ten months after what was narrated in the previous pages, around about the first days of January 1823, on a night of snow, one of these dandies, one of these idlers—obviously a true conformist, for he wore a morillo, and was snugly wrapped up in one of those huge greatcoats that then completed the cold-weather fashion plate—was getting his kicks harassing a creature on the prowl in front of the window of the officers’ café in a very low-cut ball gown and with flowers wreathed around her head. The dandy was smoking, for smoking was very much in vogue.

Every time the woman passed in front of him, along with a puff of smoke from his cigar, he would toss her a bunch of insults that he found terribly witty and amusing, like: “God, you’re ugly!” or, “Go and crawl under a rock!” or, “You’ve got no teeth!” and so on. This gentleman’s name was Monsieur Bamatabois. The woman, a sad bejewelled spectre in a dress, kept walking backward and forward in the snow and did not answer him, did not even glance at him, but continued pacing in silence and with a dismal regularity that brought her back within range of his sarcasm every five minutes, like the condemned soldier going back for the birch. Not making any impression doubtless stung the fop into action and so, taking advantage of a moment when the woman’s back was turned, he snuck up behind her as stealthily as a wolf and, choking back a laugh, swooped down to the ground, scooped up a handful of snow, and swiftly thrust it down her back between her naked shoulder blades. The girl let out a howl of rage, spun round, and, springing like a panther, hurled herself at the man, digging her nails into his face as she swore like a trooper in the foulest language that ever spilled into the gutter from some backroom brawl. These obscenities, spewing out in a voice made husky by eau-de-vie, were truly hideous coming from a mouth in which the two front teeth were, indeed, missing. It was Fantine.

The racket brought all the officers running out of the café; passersby gathered, and a great circle, laughing, jeering, and clapping, formed around this whirlwind composed of two beings hard to recognize as a man and a woman, the man thrashing around, his hat on the ground, the woman kicking and punching and screaming, bareheaded, toothless and hairless and livid with rage, truly horrible.

Suddenly a tall man darted out of the crowd, seized the woman by her mud-spattered satin bodice, and barked: “Follow me!”

The woman looked up; her furious voice died at once. Her eyes glazed over, from being merely pale, she turned white and began shaking with terror. She had recognized Javert.

The dandy took advantage of the incident to sneak away.

XIII. THE ANSWER TO SOME OF THE MUNICIPAL POLICE’S QUESTIONS

JAVERT BROKE UP the circle, moved the bystanders along, and began to stride off forcefully toward the police station, which is at the far end of the square, dragging the wretched woman along after him. She let herself be dragged like a rag doll. Neither he nor she uttered a word. The swarm of onlookers, jumping for joy, followed behind, slinging taunts. Unmitigated wretchedess being a great source of obscene jokes.

They arrived at the police station, which was a low-ceilinged room heated by a potbellied stove and guarded by a sentinel; it had a door with a wire mesh window giving onto the street. Javert pulled the door open, entered with Fantine in tow, and shut the door behind him, to the great disappointment of the gawking horde who stood on tiptoe, craning their necks at the grimy guardroom window in an effort to get an eyeful. Curiosity is a form of greed. To see is to devour.

Fantine went in and flopped in a heap in a corner, motionless and mute, cowering like a frightened dog.

The desk sergeant brought over a burning candle and put it on the table. Javert sat down, took a sheet of stamped paper1 from his pocket, and began to write.

This class of women is placed by our laws completely at the mercy of the police’s discretion. The police do what they like with them, punish them however they see fit, and confiscate at will those pathetic things they call their industry and liberty. Javert was imperturbable; his grave face betrayed no emotion. And yet he was seriously and profoundly troubled. This was one of those moments when he exercised without restraint, but with all the scruples of a strict conscience, his formidable discretionary power. In that instant, he knew, his policeman’s stool was a court bench. He was conducting a trial. He was conducting a trial and handing down a sentence. He summoned all the notions his mind could contain to come to the aid of the mighty thing he was doing. The more he examined the conduct of this girl, the more he was revolted. It was clear he had just witnessed a crime. He had just seen, out there in the street, society, represented by a property owner and voter,2 physically and verbally abused and vilified by a creature who was beyond the pale, an outcast. A prostitute had assaulted an upright citizen. He, Javert, had seen it. He wrote in silence.

When he had finished, he signed the letter, folded it, and said to the desk sergeant as he handed it to him: “Take three men and put this girl in the lockup.” Then he turned to Fantine and said: “You’re up for six months.” The poor woman shuddered.

“Six months! Six months’ jail!” she wailed. “Six months making seven sous a day! But what will happen to Cosette? What about my daughter! My daughter! God, I still owe the Thénardiers over a hundred francs, Monsieur l’inspecteur, you know that?” She dragged herself across the flagstones, wet from the muddy boots of all those men, without getting up, joining her hands together, taking great steps on her knees.

“Monsieur Javert,” she said, “I beg your mercy. I swear to you I was not in the wrong. If you’d been there when it started you would have seen! I swear to you by the Lord above that I was not in the wrong. It was that toff, whoever he is, who shoved snow down my back. Do they have the right to shove snow down our backs when we’re just going past like that, minding our own business, not causing anyone any harm? I saw red. I’m not very well, as you can see! And then, he’d been goading me for some time already. ‘God, you’re ugly! You’ve got no teeth!’ I know very well I haven’t got my teeth anymore. I did nothing, I didn’t. I said: ‘He’s just a gentleman out for a bit of fun.’ I was straight with him, I didn’t say boo. And that was when he put snow on me. Monsieur Javert, my good Monsieur l’inspecteur! Isn’t there anyone here who saw what happened and can tell you that it’s perfectly true? Maybe I was wrong to get annoyed. You know, in the heat of the moment, you lose your head. You get a bit carried away. And then, when someone puts something so cold down your back when you’re not expecting it! I was wrong to wreck the gentleman’s hat. Why did he run off? I’d beg his pardon. Oh, my God! It wouldn’t cost me anything to beg his pardon. Let me off just this once, Monsieur Javert. Listen, you don’t know this, but in prison they only let you earn seven sous a day, and, just think, I’ve got to pay a hundred francs—otherwise they’ll send back my little girl. Oh, good God! I can’t have her with me. What I do is so vile! Oh, my Cosette, oh, my little angel sent by the good Holy Virgin, what will happen to her, poor little bunny! Let me tell you. It’s the Thénardiers, they’re innkeepers, peasants, you can’t reason with them. They want money. Don’t put me in jail! You see, she’s just a little girl and they’ll dump her on the highway; you’re on your own, then, in the middle of winter; you must have pity on her, good Monsieur Javert. If she was older, she could earn her own living, but she can’t, not at that age. I’m not a bad woman at heart. It’s not being lazy or greedy that’s made me what I am. I’ve drunk eau-de-vie, but only out of misery. I don’t like it, but it makes you light in the head. In better days, you’d only have had to look in my cupboards and you’d have seen for yourself that I wasn’t some slut living in a pigsty. I had linen, lots of linen. Have pity on me, Monsieur Javert!” On and on she went, broken in two, racked by sobs, blinded by tears, her throat bare, wringing her hands, coughing with a short dry cough, and babbling so very softly in the voice of agony. Great pain is a divine and terrible ray of light that transforms the wretched. At that moment, Fantine was beautiful once more. Every so often, she paused and tenderly kissed the hem of the spook’s frock coat. She would have caused a heart of stone to melt; but there is no melting a heart of wood.

“That’s enough!” said Javert. “I’ve heard you out. Haven’t you said everything you can say? Now get going! You’ve got your six months. The Eternal Father himself could do nothing more.” At those solemn words, “the Eternal Father himself could do nothing more,” she realized the sentence had been handed down. She slumped in a heap, murmuring: “Mercy!” Javert turned his back on her.

The soldiers grabbed her by the arms.

A few minutes before this, a man had come in unnoticed. He had shut the door behind him and stood with his back against it and had listened to Fantine’s desperate pleas.

The moment the soldiers laid hands on the poor woman, who refused to get up, he stepped out of the shadows and said: “Just a moment, please!” Javert looked up and recognized Monsieur Madeleine. He took off his hat and greeted him with a sort of exasperated awkwardness: “Pardon me, Monsieur le maire—” Those words, monsieur le maire, had a strange effect on Fantine. She shot to her feet like a ghost clambering out of the grave, shoved the soldiers aside with both hands, walked straight up to Monsieur Madeleine before anyone could hold her back, and staring at him with wild eyes, cried: “Ah! So you’re the man they call Monsieur le maire!”

Then she burst into a cackle and spat in his face.

Monsieur Madeleine wiped his face and said: “Inspector Javert, let this woman go.”

Javert felt his mind was about to snap. At that instant, he experienced the most violent emotions he had ever felt in his life, one after the other and almost all at once, in a jumble. To see a streetwalker spit in the face of a mayor, well, that was something so monstrous that he would never have imagined such a thing possible, not in his wildest dreams. On the other hand, at the back of his mind, he made a confused and hideous connection between what this woman was and what the mayor might be and then he glimpsed with horror something unutterably simple in this prodigious assault. But when he saw the mayor, this magistrate, calmly wipe his face and say “Let this woman go,” he was thunderstruck; thought and speech both failed him; his capacity for amazement had been exceeded. He remained speechless, utterly lost for words.

Those words had also struck Fantine just as strangely. She lifted a bare arm and clung to the damper handle of the stove as though feeling not too steady on her feet. Yet her eyes danced all around her and she began to speak in a barely audible voice as though talking to herself: “Set me free! Let me go! Don’t make me go to jail for six months! Who said that? It isn’t possible that someone said that. I must have heard wrong. It couldn’t have been that bastard of a mayor! Was it you, my good Monsieur Javert, who said to let me go? Oh, listen! I’ll tell you and then you’ll set me free. That bastard of a mayor, that mongrel of a mayor, he’s the cause of all this. Can you imagine, Monsieur Javert, he sent me packing, because of a pack of old harlots who tell tales and stab you in the back in the workshop. If that isn’t vile, I don’t know what is! To turn away a poor girl who’s just doing her job honestly! So then, I couldn’t earn enough and that’s when all the bad luck started happening. The first thing these gentlemen from the police could do to improve things is to see to it that the prison contractors don’t cripple poor people. I’ll tell you how it works, listen. Say you make twelve sous in shirts; if that drops to nine sous, you can’t live. So you have to do what you can. Me, I had my little Cosette, I was forced to become a bad woman. So now you know it was that swine of a mayor who did all the damage. After that, I trampled on the hat of that respectable gent outside the officers’ café. But him, he’d wrecked my whole dress with his snow. The likes of us, we only have one silk dress, for evening. You know, I never meant to do anything wrong. I really didn’t, Monsieur Javert. Everywhere I look I see women much worse than me and they’re much better off. Oh, Monsieur Javert, you’re the one who said to let me go, aren’t you? You ask around, talk to my landlord, I pay the rent on time now, they’ll tell you I’m straight down the line. Oh, my God! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize—I knocked the damper of the stove and now it’s smoking.” Monsieur Madeleine listened in rapt attention. While the woman was talking, he fumbled in his jacket, pulled out his wallet and opened it. It was empty. He put it back in his pocket. He said to Fantine: “How much did you say you owed?” Fantine, who had not taken her eyes off Javert, wheeled around: “Did I say anything to you?!”

Then, addressing the soldiers: “So, you lot, tell me, did you see how I spat in his face for him? Ah, you wicked old pig of a mayor, you came here to frighten me, but I’m not frightened of you. I’m frightened of Monsieur Javert. I’m frightened of my good Monsieur Javert!” As she said this she turned back to the inspector: “Now you know all that, you know, Monsieur l’inspecteur, you’ve got to be just. I know you’re just, Monsieur l’inspecteur. In fact, it’s very simple: a man has a bit of fun shoving snow down a woman’s back, that gives them a laugh—the officers, they’ve got to have some fun somehow; the likes of me, we’re just there to keep them happy, of course we are! And then, you, you come along, you have to keep the peace, you cart off the woman in the wrong, but now you’ve thought about it, being good as you are, you say to let me go; it’s for the little one, because six months in jail, that would stop me being able to feed my little girl. Only, don’t ever come back again, you tart! Oh, I won’t come back again, Monsieur Javert! Let them do what they like with me, I won’t raise a finger. Only, today, you know, I made a racket because it hurt, I just wasn’t expecting that snow that man had; and then, like I told you, I’m not very well, I’ve got a cough, it’s like I’ve got a ball in my chest that burns me, and the doctor told me to look after myself. Here, feel that, give me your hand, don’t be frightened, there it is.” She was no longer crying, her voice was caressing, she pressed Javert’s big hairy hand over her delicate white bosom and watched him with a smile on her lips.

Suddenly she rearranged her clothes, smoothed out the wrinkles in her dress, which was hitched up almost to her knees as she crawled across the floor, and walked to the door, saying in a whisper to the soldiers with a friendly nod of the head: “Boys, Monsieur l’inspecteur said to release me, so I’m off.”

She placed her hand on the door handle. One more step and she’d be in the street.

Until that moment, Javert had stood stock-still, his eye boring a hole in the ground, all wrong in the middle of this scene like a misplaced statue waiting to be put in the right spot.

The noise of the door jolted him. He raised his head with an expression of sovereign authority, an expression always all the more frightening, the lower down power is vested, ferocious in a wild beast, atrocious in a nobody.

“Sergeant!” he shouted. “Can’t you see this hussy is making off! Who told you to let her go?”

“I did,” said Madeleine.

At the sound of Javert’s voice, Fantine had flinched and let go of the door handle the same way a thief caught in the act drops the stolen object. At the sound of Madeleine’s voice, she spun round, and from that moment, without saying a word, without even daring to breathe freely, her eyes flitted in turn from Madeleine to Javert and from Javert to Madeleine, whoever happened to be speaking.

It was obvious that Javert had been “knocked for a loop,” as they say, to have allowed himself to say what he did to the sergeant after the mayor’s invitation to set Fantine free. Had he actually reached the point of forgetting the mayor’s very presence? Had he wound up telling himself that it was not possible for any person of authority to have given such an order and that Monsieur le maire must certainly have said one thing when he meant another altogether? Or else, confronted by the outrageous things he had witnessed for the last two hours, did he tell himself that it was necessary to resort to extreme measures, that it was time for the little man to assert himself, time that the informer turned into a magistrate, that the policeman became a man of the law, and that, in this dire extremity, law and order, morality, governance, society as a whole, were personified in himself, Javert?

Whatever the case, when Monsieur Madeleine let out that “I did” we heard a moment ago, the inspector of police was seen to turn toward Monsieur le maire, pale, cold, his lips blue, his eyes desperate, his whole body shaking with a barely perceptible tremor, and he was heard to say something unprecedented: “Monsieur le maire, that can’t be done.” “How’s that?” said Monsieur Madeleine.

“This wretched woman insulted a gentleman.”

“Inspector Javert,” Monsieur Madeleine replied in a calm, conciliatory tone, “listen. You are an honest man, so I don’t mind spelling things out clearly for you. It’s like this. I happened to be crossing the square as you were carting this woman away. There were still people milling around, I asked a few questions and I found out the truth: it is the gentleman who was in the wrong, and if the police were doing their job, he should have been arrested.” Javert could not stop himself: “This miserable creature just insulted Monsieur le maire.”

“That’s my business,” said Monsieur Madeleine. “My insult is mine, if you like. I can do what I like with it.”

“I beg Monsieur le maire’s pardon. The insult is not his, it belongs to the system of justice.”

“Inspector Javert,” replied Monsieur Madeleine, “the highest form of justice is one’s conscience. I’ve heard the woman out. I know what I’m doing.” “And I, Monsieur le maire, don’t know what I am seeing.”

“Then make do with obeying.”

“I’m obeying my duty. My duty tells me that this woman should do six months behind bars.”

Monsieur Madeleine responded gently: “Listen to me carefully. She will not do a single day.”

At those decisive words, Javert risked a glare at the mayor and said to him, though in a tone of voice that was still scrupulously respectful: “It causes me despair to go against Monsieur le maire; this is the first time in my life, but he will deign to permit me to observe to him that I am within the bounds of my responsibilities. I will confine myself, since Monsieur le maire wishes it, to the case of the citizen in question. I was there. This girl threw herself at Monsieur Bamatabois, who is a voter and the owner of the magnificent house with a balcony on the corner of the esplanade, three stories, all in hewn stone. At the end of the day, some things count for something in this world! Anyhow, Monsieur le maire, this matter is a case for the street patrol and so it concerns me, and I am holding this woman, Fantine.” At these words, Monsieur Madeleine folded his arms and said in a harsh voice that no one in the town had ever yet heard: “The case you are talking about is a matter for the municipal police. By the terms of articles nine, fifteen, and sixty-six of the code of criminal law, I am the judge of it. I order this woman to be set free.” Javert struggled to make one last stand.

“But, Monsieur le maire—”

“Let me refer you to article eighty-one of the law of December 13, 1799, on arbitrary detention.”

“Monsieur le maire, allow—”

“Not another word.”

“But—”

“Get out,” said Monsieur Madeleine.

Javert took the blow standing, full on and bang in the chest like a Russian soldier. He bowed practically to the ground to Monsieur le maire and left.

Fantine moved away from the door and watched in stupefaction as he went past her.

Yet she too was in the grip of a strange upheaval. She had just watched herself being in a way argued over by two opposing forces. She had seen before her very eyes the battle between two men who held in their hands her liberty, her life, her soul, her child; one of the men pulled her into the darkness, the other lifted her back into the light. In this struggle, glimpsed through the magnifying glass of terror, the two men seemed to her like giants; one spoke like her demon, the other spoke like her good angel. The angel had triumphed over the demon, and, something that made her shiver from head to toe, this angel, this liberator, was precisely the man she abhorred, this mayor that she had so long considered the author of all her ills, this Madeleine! And at the very moment when she had just insulted him in the most heinous way, he had saved her! So, had she got it all wrong? Did she therefore need to transform her whole soul? … She did not know, she was trembling. She listened, bewildered, she watched, alarmed, and at each word that Monsieur Madeleine uttered, she felt the awful blackness of hate dissolving and evaporating inside her and she felt something indescribably warm and wonderful well up in her heart; it was joy, trust, and love.

When Javert had gone, Monsieur Madeleine turned to her, and said in a careful voice, struggling to sound as though he were in control and not on the verge of breaking down: “I have heard you. It’s all news to me. I believe it’s true and I feel it’s true. I didn’t even know you had left my workshop. Why didn’t you come and see me in person? But here’s how it will be: I will pay your debts, I will have your child come to you, or you will go to her. You will live here, or in Paris, or wherever you like. I will look after your child and you. You will never have to work again, if you don’t want to. I will give you all the money you need. You will go back to being an honest woman by being happy again. And, listen, I tell you here and now, if all is as you say, and I don’t doubt it for a second, you have never stopped being virtuous and holy in the eyes of God. Oh, you poor, poor woman!” This was more than poor Fantine could bear. To be with Cosette again! To leave this ignoble life behind! To live free, rich, happy, honest, with Cosette! To suddenly see blossoming in the middle of all her misery the fruits of paradise! She gazed, stunned, at the man speaking to her and could only let out two or three sobs: oh! oh! oh! Her legs gave way, she fell on her knees before Monsieur Madeleine, and before he could stop her, he felt her take his hand and press it to her lips.

Then she fainted.