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BOOK SEVEN

THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR

I. SISTER SIMPLICE

NOT ALL THE incidents you are about to read of were ever known in Montreuil-sur-mer, but the few stories that did make it there had such an indelible impact that it would be a serious gap in this book if we were not to narrate them in their minutest details.

Among these details, the reader will come across two or three improbable circumstances that we are keeping out of respect for the truth.

During the afternoon that followed Javert’s visit, Monsieur Madeleine went to see Fantine as usual.

Before going in to Fantine, he asked for Sister Simplice. The two nuns who staffed the infirmary, Lazarist sisters1 like all the Sisters of Charity, were called Sister Perpetua and Sister Simplice.

Sister Perpetua was an ordinary village lass, a Sister of Charity only in the broadest sense of the term, who had entered the house of God as someone else might enter domestic service. She was a nun the way others are cooks. This species is not rare. Monastic orders gladly accept this chunky peasant clay, so easily moulded into a Capuchin nun or an Ursuline.2 Such rustics are used for the tougher chores of the religious life. The transition from cowherd to White Friar3 is not drastic in the least—the one turns into the other without too much effort; the common denominator of ignorance, whether of the village or of the cloister, is all the groundwork required and immediately places the country bumpkin on equal footing with the monk. Let the peasant smock out a little at the seams and you have your monk’s frock. Sister Perpetua was a sturdy nun from Marines, near Pontoise, given to patois, psalm singing, whining, sweetening herbal concoctions according to the bigotry or hypocrisy of the bedridden invalid, rough with the sick, gruff with the dying, practically throwing God in their faces, bombarding their death throes with furious prayers, rash, honest, and red-faced.

Sister Simplice was white, with a waxy whiteness. Set beside Sister Perpetua, she was the beeswax altar candle next to the household candle made of tallow. Vincent de Paul4 has divinely portrayed the Sister of Charity in words that vividly paint the combination of a high degree of freedom with a high degree of humility: His sisters were to spend their time nursing the sick in their homes, “having no monastery but the homes of the sick, no cell but a hired room, no chapel but the parish church, no cloister but the streets of the city or wards of the hospital, no fence but obedience, no gate but the fear of God, no veil but holy modesty.” This ideal had been kept alive in Sister Simplice. No one could tell how old Sister Simplice was; she had never been young and seemed never to grow old. She was a person—we don’t dare use the word woman—who was calm, austere, good company yet detached, and who had never told a lie. She was so gentle she seemed fragile, but was actually the opposite, solid as a rock. She touched the miserable lightly, with lovely, fine, pure fingers. There was silence, so to speak, in her words; she said only what was necessary, no more, and she had a voice that would have been edifying in a confessional and enchanting in a drawing room. This fineness adapted itself to the homespun nun’s habit, providing a constant reminder of God and heaven in the rough contact. We might insist on this detail. Never to have lied, never to have told, out of whatever interest, or even disinterestedly, anything other than the truth, the sacred truth—this was the distinctive feature of Sister Simplice; it was the mark of her virtue. She was virtually famous in the congregation for this imperturbable truthfulness. Abbé Sicard speaks of Sister Simplice in a letter to the deaf-mute Massieu.5 However sincere, however loyal and incorruptible we may be, we each have at least one crack in our candour formed by the innocent white lie. She did not. A white lie, a little white lie, does such a thing really exist? To lie is the absolute of evil. To lie a little is not possible; one who lies, lies wholly; the lie is the very face of the devil. Satan has two names—he is called Satan and he is called Lying. That is the way she looked at it. And she practised what she preached. The result was the whiteness we mentioned, a whiteness that bathed even her lips and eyes in its radiance. Her smile was white, her gaze was white. There was not a single cobweb, not a single speck of dust on the window of that conscience. In vowing obedience to the Order of Saint Vincent de Paul, she had specially chosen the name of Simplice. Simplice of Sicily, as we know, was the saint who preferred to have both breasts ripped off rather than say that she was born in Segesta, when she was born in Syracuse—a lie that would have saved her. Such a patron saint suited this soul perfectly.

When she entered the order Sister Simplice had two faults, which she managed to correct slowly over time; she had a sweet tooth and she loved getting letters. She only ever read a prayer book in big letters and in Latin. She did not understand Latin but she understood the book.

The pious old maid had really taken to Fantine, probably sensing the latent virtue in her, and she had devoted herself to caring for her almost exclusively. Monsieur Madeleine took Sister Simplice aside and commended Fantine to her with a singular insistence that the sister would later recall. When he left the sister, he approached Fantine.

Every day Fantine waited for Monsieur Madeleine to appear as you might await a wave of heat or a ray of joy. She would tell the sisters: “I only feel alive when Monsieur le maire is there.” That day she had a high fever. As soon as she saw the mayor she asked him: “Cosette?” He replied with a tight smile: “Soon.”

Monsieur Madeleine was the same as ever with Fantine. Only, he stayed for an hour instead of half an hour, to Fantine’s great delight. He badgered everyone in an effort to ensure that the sick woman had everything she needed, lacked nothing. It was noted that there was a moment when his face clouded over. But this was explained by the fact, soon learned, that the doctor had bent close to his ear and said to him: “She’s going down fast.” He then returned to the mairie and was seen by the office boy there to examine carefully a road map of France that was hanging in his room. He jotted down a few figures in pencil on a scrap of paper.

II. THE PERSPICACITY OF MASTER SCAUFFLAIRE

HE SET OUT from the mairie for the outskirts of town to see a Flemish man, Master Scaufflaër, Scaufflaire in French, who hired horses and “cabriolets upon request.” To get to this Scaufflaire’s place, the shortest route was along a generally deserted backstreet where the presbytery of the parish Monsieur Madeleine resided in lay. The priest was, so they said, a worthy and respectable gent, one who gave good advice. When Monsieur Madeleine reached the presbytery there was only one other person in the street and this fellow pedestrian noticed the following: that Monsieur le maire, after having gone past the priest’s place, had stopped, stood motionless for a moment, and then retraced his steps as far as the presbytery door, which was a motley affair with an iron door-knocker. He promptly seized the door-knocker and raised it; then stopped himself again and stayed that way, thinking, for a few seconds; and then, instead of letting the door-knocker fall with a loud rap, he gently brought it down and continued on his way, suddenly in a hurry as it seemed.

Monsieur Madeleine found Master Scaufflaire at home busy fixing a harness.

“Master Scaufflaire,” he said, “you wouldn’t happen to have a good horse, would you?” “Monsieur le maire,” said the Fleming, “all my horses are good. What do you mean by a good horse, anyway?” “I mean a horse that can do twenty leagues in a day.”

“Christ!” the Fleming exclaimed. “Twenty leagues!”

“Yes.”

“Hitched to a cabriolet?”

“Yes.”

“And how much time would he have to rest after the run?”

“He’d have to be able to set out again the next day.”

“To do the same trip?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ! And that’s twenty leagues?”

Monsieur Madeleine pulled out of his pocket the note on which he had penciled his figures. He showed it to the Fleming. The figures were the numbers five, six, and eight and a half.

“You see,” he said. “That makes nineteen and a half, so we might as well say twenty leagues.” “Monsieur le maire,” the Fleming went on, “I have just the ticket. My little white horse. You must have seen him going by sometimes. He’s a little thing from Bas-Boulonnais. Full of fire. They tried to make a saddle horse of him to start with. Hah! He kicked like crazy and threw everyone to the ground. They thought he must have been vicious and no one knew what to do with him. I bought him. I put a cabriolet on him. Monsieur, that’s what he was angling for; he’s as gentle as a lamb and he rides like the wind. Ah, but mind you, you mustn’t hop on his back. He has no intention of being a saddle horse. To each his ambition. Pull, yes, carry, no; you’d swear that’s what he told himself.” “And he’ll go the distance?”

“Your twenty leagues. At a brisk trot all the way, and he’ll do it in under eight hours. But these are the conditions.” “Tell me.”

“First, you let him get his breath back for an hour when you’re halfway; he can eat then and someone has to be standing by while he’s eating to stop the boy from the inn from stealing his oats, for I’ve noticed at inns that the oats get drunk by the stable boys more than they get eaten by the horses.” “I’ll look after that.”

“Second … is the cabriolet for Monsieur le maire?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, Monsieur le maire will travel alone and without luggage so as not to overload the horse.” “Agreed.”

“But Monsieur le maire, not having anyone with him, will be obliged to see to the oats himself.” “That’s right.”

“I’ll need thirty francs a day. Days off paid for too. Not a penny less, and what the horse eats is at Monsieur le maire’s expense.” Monsieur Madeleine drew three napoléons out of his purse and put them on the table.

“There’s two days in advance.”

“Fourth, for a trip like this, a cabriolet will be too heavy and will wear out the horse. Monsieur le maire will have to agree to travel in a little tilbury I happen to have.” “I’ll go along with that.”

“It’s light but it’s open.”

“That’s all the same to me.”

“Has Monsieur le maire considered that it’s winter?”

Monsieur Madeleine stayed silent. Master Scaufflaire continued: “That it could rain?” Monsieur Madeleine raised his head and said: “The tilbury and the horse will be out in front of my place at four-thirty tomorrow morning.” “Say no more, Monsieur le maire,” Scaufflaire replied before scratching away with his thumbnail at a mark on the wooden table and adding in the offhand way the Flemish soften their shrewdness: “While we’re at it, I’ve just realized! Monsieur le maire hasn’t told me where he’s headed. Where is Monsieur le maire off to?” He had thought of nothing else from the moment the conversation began, but for some reason hadn’t dared bring the subject up.

“Does this horse have good strong forelegs?” asked Monsieur Madeleine.

“Yes, Monsieur le maire. You just have to hold him back a little going downhill. Are there are lot of ups and downs from here to where you’re going?” “Don’t forget to be at my door at four-thirty sharp in the morning,” replied Monsieur Madeleine, and with that he spun on his heel.

The Fleming stood there with his mouth open—“like an idiot,” as he himself put it some time later.

Monsieur le maire had been gone two or three minutes when the door swung open again; it was Monsieur le maire. He had the same unflappable preoccupied look.

“Monsieur Scaufflaire,” he said, “what value would you put on your horse and your tilbury, the ones you’re renting out to me, with the one pulling the other?” “The one dragging the other, more like, Monsieur le maire,” guffawed the Fleming.

“However you like to put it. So?”

“Does Monsieur le maire want to buy them from me?”

“No, but in any event I’d like to insure them. When I return you can give me my money back. How much do you reckon your horse and cabriolet are worth?” “Five hundred francs, Monsieur le maire.”

“Here you are.”

Monsieur Madeleine placed a banknote on the table, went out again, and this time did not come back.

Master Scaufflaire could have kicked himself for not saying a thousand francs. In any case, the horse and tilbury together weren’t worth more than a hundred écus.

The Fleming called his wife and told her all about it. Where the hell could Monsieur le maire be off to? They conferred.

“He’s off to Paris,” said the wife. “I don’t think so,” said the husband. Monsieur Madeleine had left the note with the numbers on it behind on the mantelpiece. The Fleming grabbed it and studied it. “Five, six, eight and a half? That must refer to the post houses.” He turned to his wife. “I’ve got it.” “What?” “It’s five leagues from here to Hesdin, six from Hesdin to Saint-Pol, and eight and a half from Saint-Pol to Arras. He’s off to Arras.” In the meantime, Monsieur Madeleine had gone home.

To return home from Master Scaufflaire’s he had taken the long way round, as though the presbytery door was some kind of temptation for him, one he wished to avoid. He had gone up to his room and shut himself in, which in itself was fairly unremarkable since he usually went to bed early. But the factory concierge, who was at the same time Monsieur Madeleine’s only servant, noted that the light went out at as early as eight-thirty, and she said as much to the cashier when he came back, adding: “Is Monsieur le maire sick? I thought he looked a bit peculiar.” The cashier lived in the room exactly below Monsieur Madeleine’s room. He took no notice of the concierge’s words, went to bed and went to sleep. Around midnight, he woke with a start; he had heard a noise overhead in his sleep. He listened. It was the sound of feet coming and going as though someone were pacing up and down in the room above. He listened more carefully and recognized Monsieur Madeleine’s tread. That struck him as strange; usually there was not a sound from Monsieur Madeleine’s room before it was time to get up. A moment later the cashier heard what sounded like a wardrobe door being opened and shut. Then a piece of furniture was moved, then there was a silence, and then the pacing began again. The cashier sat up in bed, shook himself wide awake, looked out, and through his casement window saw the reddish reflection of light from a window on the wall opposite. From the direction of the light, it could only have been the window of Monsieur Madeleine’s room. The reflection flickered as if it came from a blazing fire and not from a lamp. There was no trace of the shadow of the framed panes—which indicated that the window was wide open. In the freezing cold, that open window was startling. The cashier went back to sleep. An hour or so later, he woke again. The same tread, pacing to and fro, could still be heard directly overhead.

The reflection still graced the wall, but it was now pale and peaceful like the reflection from a lamp or a candle. The window was still open.

This is what was happening in Monsieur Madeleine’s bedroom.

III. A STORM ON THE BRAIN

THE READER HAS no doubt worked out that Monsieur Madeleine was none other than Jean Valjean.

We have already delved into the depths of that man’s conscience; the moment has come to delve a little deeper. We do not do so lightly, without emotion or without trembling. There is nothing more terrifying than this kind of contemplation. The mind’s eye can find nothing more dazzling or dark anywhere outside mankind; it cannot fix on anything more fearful, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. There is a spectacle greater than the sea, and that is the sky; there is a spectacle greater than the sky, and that is the human soul.

To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only that of a single man, were it only that of the most insignificant man, would be to meld all epics into one superior epic, the epic to end all. Conscience means the chaos of chimeras, of lusts and temptations, the furnace of dreams, the den of ideas we are ashamed of; it is the pandemonium of sophisms, it is the battlefield of passions. Pierce through the livid face of a human being at certain moments as they ponder, look behind the façade, look into the soul, look into the darkness. There, beneath the outer silence, titanic struggles are taking place as in Homer, mêlées of dragons and hydras and swarms of phantoms as in Milton, visionary spirals as in Dante. What a sombre thing is this infinity that each man carries within him and against which he measures in despair what his brain wants and what his life puts into action!

Dante Alighieri came upon a sinister door1 one day and hesitated before it. Here stands another door before us, on the threshold of which we hesitate. Let’s go in anyway.

We have very little to add to what the reader already knows about what happened to Jean Valjean since the Petit-Gervais episode. From that moment, as we saw, he was a different man. What the bishop had wanted him to become, he became. This was more than a transformation, it was a transfiguration.

He managed to vanish, sold the bishop’s silver, keeping only the candlesticks as mementos, crept from town to town, travelled across France, turned up in Montreuil-sur-mer, had the bright idea we’ve mentioned above, achieved what we’ve outlined, managed to make himself unassailable and inaccessible and from then on, well established in Montreuil-sur-mer, happy to feel his conscience burdened by his past and the first half of his existence belied by this new phase, he lived a quiet life, reassured and hopeful, having only two concerns: to hide his name and to sanctify his life; to escape the clutches of men and to return to God.

These two concerns were so closely linked in his mind that they were inseparable; they were both equally absorbing and imperious and governed his every act. Normally they were in harmony, regulating the way he led his life; they turned him toward a life lived in the shadow; they made him benevolent and true; they gave him the same counsel. But sometimes there was a conflict between them. When this happened, as you will recall, the man the whole countryside called Monsieur Madeleine did not waver in sacrificing the first to the second, his security to his virtue. And so, in spite of all reservations and all prudence, he had kept the bishop’s candlesticks, worn mourning for him, sent for and questioned all the little Savoyards coming through, made inquiries about the families of Faverolles, and saved old Fauchelevent’s life despite the disturbing insinuations of Javert. It seems, as we have already remarked, that he thought, along with all those who have ever been wise, holy, and just, that his first duty was not to himself.

But, we have to say, nothing like this had ever come up before. Never had the two notions that ruled this unhappy man, whose sufferings are the subject of our tale, locked horns within himself in such a serious battle. He realized this dimly but deeply as soon as Javert had opened his mouth the day he came into his office. The instant that name, which he had buried under so many layers, was so weirdly voiced, he was struck dumb and sent reeling as though intoxicated by the sinister grotesqueness of his fate, and, through the daze, he felt the shudder that heralds huge quakes; he bent low like an oak about to be battered by a storm, like a soldier about to be assailed. He felt darkness full of thunder and lightning directly overhead. While he was listening to Javert speak, he had had an initial impulse to dash out, to run, to denounce himself, to drag Champmathieu out of jail and put himself in; this had been painful and heartrending like an incision in live flesh, and then it had passed and he had said to himself: “Let’s wait and see! Let’s wait and see!” He got this initial generous impulse under control and recoiled before such heroics.

No doubt it would have been very nice if, after the sacred words of the bishop, after so many years of repentance and self-denial, in the middle of a penance so nobly undertaken, the man had not batted an eyelid for an instant, even when faced with such a terrible situation, and had gone on walking at the same pace toward the yawning chasm at the bottom of which lay heaven; that would have been very beautiful, but it is not what happened. It is, of course, our job to make known exactly what was going on in this man’s soul and we can only tell it the way it was. What won out at first was the instinct of self-preservation; he swiftly gathered his wits about him, stifled his emotions, considered that great peril, the presence of Javert, postponed any decision with the firmness of terror, felt dizzy with all there was to do, and resumed his outward calmness as a gladiator picks up his shield.

He remained in this state for the rest of the day, a tornado whirling within, profound calmness without; he took only what we might call “precautionary measures.” Everything was still confused and in turmoil in his brain; his brain was still so troubled that he could not latch on to any idea clearly and he himself would have been hard-pressed to describe what was happening to him except to say that he had just suffered quite a blow. He took himself off as usual to Fantine’s sickbed and stayed longer than usual out of an instinctual goodness, telling himself that this was how he should behave, and commended her earnestly to the sisters in case he should have to absent himself. He felt vaguely that he might be compelled to go to Arras and, without being in the least determined to make the trip, he told himself that being above all suspicion as he was, there was no harm in witnessing what would happen there, and so he retained Scaufflaire’s tilbury, in order to be ready for any eventuality.

He dined with a fairly good appetite.

When he got back to his room, he gathered his wits about him again.

He examined the situation and found it quite incredible; so incredible that in the middle of his reflections he was moved by some mysterious and virtually inexplicable impulse of anxiety to get up from his chair and bolt the door. He was afraid something else might slip in and so barricaded himself against the possibility.

A moment later, he blew out his light. It was getting on his nerves.

It seemed to him that somebody could see him.

Who could that be?

Alas! The very thing he wanted to keep outside had entered; what he wanted to blind was looking at him. His conscience.

His conscience, meaning, God.

Yet at first he deluded himself. He felt safe and alone; with the bolt in place, he felt impregnable. With the candle out, he felt invisible. And so he pulled himself together. He sat with his elbows on the table, held his head in his hands, and began to meditate in the darkness.

“Where am I? Am I sure I’m not dreaming? What was said? Is it true I saw that Javert and that he said what I think he said? Who can this Champmathieu be? Someone who looks like me? How can that be? When I think that only yesterday I was happy and so far from having the faintest inkling! What was I doing this time yesterday? What is this all about? How will it turn out? What am I going to do?” You can see what torment he was in. His brain had lost all power to retain ideas, they rushed through like waves and he grabbed his forehead in both hands to try and stop them.

This raging tumult shattered his will and his reason; he tried to extract some clarity and resolution from it, but all he came up with was anguish.

His head was on fire. He went to the window and threw it wide open. There were no stars in the sky. He went and sat back down at the table.

The first hour flew by.

Little by little, however, dim outlines began to form and hold their shape in his mind and he could perceive with the precision of reality, not the situation in its entirety, but some of the details.

He began by recognizing that, as extraordinary and critical as the situation was, he was completely in control of it.

His bewilderment only grew.

Independent of the strict religious goal his actions were directed toward, everything he had ever done till that day was nothing but a hole he had been digging in order to bury his name. What he had always most dreaded in his hours of turning on himself, during his nights of insomnia, was ever to hear that name spoken; he told himself that this would, for him, be the end of everything; that the day that name reappeared, it would cause his new life to vaporize around him, and, who knows, perhaps inside of him, his new soul? He shuddered at the very idea that this was possible. Certainly, if anyone had told him in those moments that a time would come when that name would resound in his ears again, when those hideous words, Jean Valjean, would shoot out of the dark and rear up before him, when that fearsome bolt from the blue fated to dispel the mystery he had wrapped himself in would suddenly turn into a circle of light and shine over his head; and that the name would not threaten him, that the light would produce only deeper darkness, that the torn veil would only intensify the mystery, that this earthquake would consolidate his edifice, that this prodigious event would have only the effect, if that’s what he himself wished, of making his existence at once clearer and more impenetrable, and that, from his confrontation with the phantom of Jean Valjean, the good and worthy bourgeois Monsieur Madeleine would emerge more honoured, more at peace, and more respected than ever—if anyone had told him that, he would have shaken his head and dismissed such words as nonsense. Well! All that was precisely what had just happened, this piling on of impossible events was a fact, and God had allowed such insanities to turn into realities!

His musings grew clearer and clearer. He was able to take in his situation more and more.

He felt as though he had just woken up from some strange sleep, to find himself sliding down a slope in the middle of the night, on his feet, shivering, scrabbling backward in vain, on the extreme brink of an abyss. He could distinctly make out in the shadow a stranger that fate mistook for him and pushed into the gulf in his place. For the gulf to close up again, someone had to fall in—himself or the other man.

He had only to leave things alone.

Suddenly everything became clear, and he admitted this: that his place in the galleys was empty, that no matter what he did, it was still waiting for him, that robbing Petit-Gervais led him straight back there, that the empty place was waiting for him and would pull at him until he was back in it, that this was inevitable and fatal. And then he said to himself: that at that moment he had a substitute, that apparently a man named Champmathieu had the bad luck to be this substitute, and that, as for himself, present in jail from now on in the person of this Champmathieu, present in society under the name of Monsieur Madeleine, he had nothing more to fear, as long as he did not prevent people from sealing upon Champmathieu’s head the stone of infamy that, like the stone over the grave, falls once, never to rise again.

All of this was so intensely violent and so strange that it created an indescribable commotion inside him that no one ever experiences more than two or three times in a lifetime, a sort of convulsion of your conscience that stirs up all the murky dubious things the heart contains, which are composed of irony, joy, and despair—what we might call an inner burst of laughter.

He promptly relit his candle.

“Well, so what!” he said. “What am I so afraid of? Why go over it all again? I’m saved. It’s over. There was only one door still ajar through which my past could erupt into my present life. That door is walled up now! Forever! This Javert who has been on my tail for so long, with his appalling instinct that seemed to have sniffed me out, that did sniff me out, for Christ’s sake! the way he followed me everywhere, this ghoulish hound always nipping at my heels, now he’s been thrown off the scent, he’s sniffing around elsewhere, absolutely off the track! Now he’s satisfied, he’ll let me alone, he’s got his Jean Valjean! Who knows? He probably even wants to leave town! And it all came about without my doing a thing! I had nothing to do with it! So then, what? What’s so miserable about that? Anyone who saw me now would think something terrible had happened, for heaven’s sake! After all, if anyone has come to grief, it’s not my fault. It’s all the work of fate. Apparently that’s what fate wants! Do I have the right to undo the work of Providence? What am I after now? Why am I sticking my oar in? It’s none of my business. Lord! I’m not happy! What’s missing? The goal to which I’ve been aspiring for so many years, the one great dream that rules my nights, the object of my prayers to heaven above, safety—now I’ve got it! It’s God’s will. I’ve got no business interfering with God’s will. And why does God will it? So I can carry on what I started, so I can do good, so that one day I can be a great and inspiring example, so that it can be said that there was at last a bit of happiness involved in this penance that I’ve undergone and in this virtue that I returned to! Really, I don’t know why I was afraid just now to go and spill my guts to the good curé as my confessor, and to ask his advice; this is obviously what he would have told me. So that’s decided! Let things alone! Let God’s will be done!” He talked to himself in the depths of his conscience in this way, leaning over what we might call his own abyss. Then he got up from his chair and began to pace the room.

“So,” he said, “that’s enough of that. A decision has been reached and that settles that!” But he felt no joy. Just the opposite.

You can’t stop your mind returning to an idea any more than you can stop the sea returning to shore. For the sailor, it is known as the tide; for the person with a guilty conscience, it is known as remorse. God lifts the soul as well as the ocean.

After a few moments, try as he might, he was forced to resume the grim dialogue in which he was the one who both spoke and listened, saying what he wanted to keep quiet, listening to what he did not want to hear, yielding to that mysterious power that said to him: “Think!” Just as it said two thousand years ago to another condemned man: “Walk!” Before we go any further, and in the interests of being fully understood, we must insist on an essential observation.

It is incontestable that we talk to ourselves, there is no thinking being who does not do so. We could even say that talk is never more of a magnificent mystery than when it travels, within a person’s inner life, from mind to conscience—and back again, from conscience to mind. It’s only in this sense that we should understand the words often used in this chapter: he said, he cried out. We say to ourselves, we talk to ourselves, we cry out inside ourselves, without the outer silence being broken. There is a great tumult; everything in us speaks, except our mouths. The realities of the soul are no less real for not being visible and tangible.

So he asked himself where he stood. He put himself through the third degree over this “decision reached.” He confessed to himself that everything he had just managed to get into order in his mind was monstrous, that “to let things alone,” “to let God’s will be done,” was quite simply horrible. To let this mistake of fate and of men be perpetrated, not to stop it, to have a hand in the process through his silence, in a word, to do nothing, was to do everything! It was the final degree of hypocritical vileness! It was a crime—a low, cowardly, sly, abject, hideous crime!

For the first time in eight years, the poor man felt the bitter taste of wrongfulness.

He spat it out in disgust.

He continued to quiz himself. He asked himself sternly what he meant by the following phrase: “My goal has been achieved!” He declared to himself that his life did, indeed, have a goal. But what goal? To hide his name? To hoodwink the police? Was it for something so petty that he had done all he had done? Didn’t he have another goal, a big one, the true one? To save, not his body, but his soul. To become honest and good again. To be a just man! Isn’t that—especially that, uniquely that—what he had always wanted, what the bishop had demanded of him? To close the door on his past? But he wasn’t closing it, for God’s sake! He was opening it again by doing something despicable! He was reverting to being a thief again, and the most odious of thieves! He was robbing another of his existence, of his life, his peace of mind, his place under the sun! He was becoming a murderer! He was murdering some poor bastard, morally speaking, he was inflicting this ghastly living death on him, this being buried alive, known as jail! On the contrary, to give himself up, to save this man struck by such a ghastly mistake, to take his name back, to become once more, out of duty, the convict, Jean Valjean—that was truly to complete his resurrection and close forever the hell he had come from! To fall into it again in appearance was to leave it behind in reality! He had to do it! He would have done nothing if he didn’t do that! His whole life would have been useless, all his penitence wasted, and there would be only one thing left to say: What is the point? He felt that the bishop was there, with him, that the bishop was even more present now that he was dead, that the bishop was watching him, faithfully, that from now on the mayor Madeleine and all his virtues would be abhorrent to him and that the galley slave Jean Valjean would be noble and pure in his sight. He felt that most people saw his mask, but that the bishop saw his face. That ordinary men saw his life, but the bishop saw his conscience. So he had to go to Arras, free the false Jean Valjean, denounce the true one! Alas! That was the greatest of sacrifices, the most moving of victories, the final step to take; but it had to be done. Painful fate! He would only enter into sanctity in the eyes of God if he reentered infamy in the eyes of men!

“So,” he said, “my mind’s made up! Let’s do our duty! Let’s save the man!”

He practically shouted those words, quite unaware that he was talking out loud. He gathered his books, checked them and put them in order. He threw on the fire a bundle of letters of credit that he held2 over some small traders who had their backs to the wall. He wrote a letter which he then sealed, and wrote an address on the envelope that you could have read, had you been in the room at the time: To Monsieur Laffitte, Banker, rue d’Artois, at Paris.

From a secretaire he pulled a wallet that held some banknotes and the passport he had used that same year to go to the elections. Anyone who had seen him perform these various actions, which had such a serious meditative underpinning, would not have had any idea what was going on inside him. Only, at times, his lips began to move; at other times, he looked up and focused on some point on the wall as though it was precisely there that there was something he hoped to clear up or question.

The letter to Monsieur Laffitte dealt with, he pocketed it along with the wallet and began pacing again.

His reverie had not deviated. He continued to see his duty clearly written in luminous letters flaming before his very eyes and following his eyes around: Get going! Name yourself! Give yourself up!

He also saw, as if they moved in front of him in perceptible form, the two ideas that, till then, had been the twin rules of his life: to hide his name, to sanctify his soul. For the first time, these imperatives seemed to him to be absolutely distinct, and he saw the difference that separated them. He recognized that one of these ideas was necessarily good, while the other could turn out to be bad; that the good idea was devotion and the other, the cult of personality; that one idea said your neighbour and the other said yourself; that one came from the light and the other came from the darkness.

They struggled with each other, he could see them fighting. The more he thought about it, the larger they grew in his mind’s eye; they had now grown to colossal size, and it seemed to him that he was watching the titanic struggle, inside himself, within that infinity we spoke of earlier, in the midst of darkness and light, between a god and a giant.

He was full of horror, but it seemed to him that the good thought was winning. He felt that he was reaching the other decisive moment of his conscience and his fate; that the bishop had marked the first phase of his new life and that this Champmathieu was marking the second. After a great crisis, a great test of strength.

Yet the fever, for an instant quelled, gradually came over him again. A thousand thoughts flitted through him, but they only strengthened him in his resolve.

One moment he told himself that he was perhaps taking things too hard, that after all, this Champmathieu was of no interest, that he was, at the end of the day, a thief. He answered himself that if the man was, in fact, a thief and had stolen a few apples, it meant a month in jail. That was a long way from the galleys. And who knows, anyhow? Did he actually steal? Was there any proof? The name Jean Valjean had battened down on him, seeming to dispense with any need for proof. Don’t the king’s prosecutors usually act in similar fashion? The man is believed to be a thief because he is known to be a convict.

In another instant, the idea came to him that if he gave himself up, perhaps they would take into account the heroism of his action and his honest upstanding life of the last seven years and all he had done for the region, and pardon him.

But this supposition evaporated pretty swiftly and he smiled bitterly at the thought that the theft of those forty sous from Petit-Gervais made him a recidivist, that that business would certainly raise its ugly head again and, in the precise terms of the law, would make him a candidate for forced labour for life.

He turned away from all delusion, detached himself more and more from earthly things and sought consolation and strength elsewhere. He told himself he had to do his duty; that he might even be no more unhappy after having done his duty than after having eluded it; that if he let well enough alone, if he remained in Montreuil-sur-mer, his standing, his good reputation, his good works, the deference, the veneration, his charity, his wealth, his popularity, his virtue, would all be tainted by a crime; and what a taste all those sacred things would leave, tainted by something so vile! Whereas, if he went ahead with his sacrifice and landed in jail, shackled to a post, in an iron collar, with a green cap, doing hard labour till the end of his days, in relentless shame, there would be a touch of paradise involved!

Lastly he told himself that it was essential, that this was his fate, that it was not for him to disturb the way things were arranged up above, that in any case he had to choose: either virtue without and abomination within or holiness within and disgrace on show without.

In stirring up so many gloomy notions, his courage never failed him but his brain hurt, and he began to think of other things in spite of himself, meaningless things.

His blood was pounding violently in his temples. He was still pacing to and fro. First midnight rang out from the parish church, then from the mairie. He counted the twelve strokes from the two clocks and compared the sound of the two bells. He remembered as he did so that only a few days before he had seen at a scrap merchant’s an old clock for sale on which this name was written: Antoine Albin de Romainville.

He was cold. He lit a small fire. It didn’t occur to him to shut the window. Even so, he fell once more into a stupor. He had to make a huge effort to recall what on earth he’d been thinking before midnight sounded. He finally remembered.

“Ah, yes!” he said to himself. “I’d decided to give myself up.”

All of a sudden he thought of Fantine.

“Wait a minute!” he said. “What about that poor woman!”

At this juncture, a new crisis erupted.

Fantine, appearing suddenly in his inner debate, was like a ray of light shining where it was least expected. It seemed to him that everything around him looked different suddenly and he cried out: “Of course! Till now, I’ve been thinking only of myself! I’ve only considered what suits me! It suits me either to keep quiet or to give myself up, to hide myself or to save my soul, to be a magistrate, despicable but respected, or a galley slave, disgraced but noble, it’s all about me, me, me, me, nothing but me! But good God! Talk about sheer egotism! Different forms of egotism, but egotism just the same! How about thinking of others for a change? The first sacred duty is to think of one’s neighbour. Let’s see, let’s have a closer look. Myself excepted, myself eliminated, myself left out of the picture, what happens with all of this? If I give myself up? They nab me, they let this Champmathieu go, they stick me back in the galleys. Right. And then what? What happens here? Ah! Here there is a region, a town, factories, a whole industry, workers, men, women, old grandfathers, children, poor people! I created all that, I keep all that going; wherever there’s a chimney smoking, I’m the one who puts the log in the fire and the meat in the pot; I’ve created ease of living, movement, credit; before me there was nothing; I got things going again, brought things to life, put some spark back into things, invigorated, stimulated, enriched the whole place; with me gone, the soul is gone. If I take myself off, everything will die. And that woman who has suffered so much, who was so noble in her fall from grace … I was the cause of her downfall, albeit unwittingly! And what about the child I was about to go and get, I promised her mother! Don’t I also owe something to this woman by way of reparation for the harm I’ve done her? If I disappeared, what would happen? The mother would die. The little girl would have to fend for herself. So that’s exactly what would happen if I give myself up. What if I don’t give myself up? Let’s see, if I don’t give myself up?” After putting this question to himself, he stopped; he experienced a momentary hesitation and trembling, but the moment was soon over, and he answered himself calmly: “Well, that man goes to the galleys, that’s true, but, what the hell! He did steal! There’s no point in my pretending he didn’t steal, he stole, all right! Me, I stay here, I carry on. In ten years, I’ll have earned ten million, I give it back to the community, I keep nothing myself, what’s it to me? It’s not for myself that I do what I do! The prosperity of all grows, old industries crank up and expand, new manufactures and workshops mushroom, families—a hundred families, a thousand families!—are happy; the countryside gets peopled; villages spring up where there are only farms, farms spring up where there’s nothing; poverty disappears, and with poverty, debauchery, prostitution, theft, murder, all the vices, all the crimes, disappear, too! And that poor mother can bring up her daughter! And the whole region is rich and honest! For heaven’s sake, I must have been mad, I must have been completely brainsick, why on earth would I talk about giving myself up? I really had better pull myself together, this demands careful reflection, I really mustn’t do anything hasty. Good Lord! Just because I fancied playing the great and the generous man—talk about melodrama, for God’s sake!—because I was only thinking of myself, myself alone, good Lord! And all to save—who knows who? Some thief, obviously a scoundrel. And from a punishment that might be a tad excessive but is no doubt justified, at bottom. And for such a man, the whole region must go to the dogs! A poor woman must croak in the hospital! A poor little girl must croak by the roadside! Like dogs! Ah, now that’s abominable, if you want abominable! Without the mother even sighting her child again! Without the child even knowing a thing about her mother! And all for this old bastard of an apple thief who, beyond any doubt, deserves the galleys for something else, if not for that! What fine scruples—to save a man who’s guilty and sacrifice the innocent, to save some old vagrant, who’s only got a few more years left in him when all’s said and done and who wouldn’t be any worse off in the galleys than he would be at home in his hovel, to sacrifice a whole population, mothers, women, children! Poor little Cosette who has only me in the world and who is no doubt at this very moment completely blue with cold in the glorified shack of those Thénardiers! There’s some more riffraff for you, that lot! So I’m supposed to fail in my duty of care toward all those poor creatures! And I’m supposed to go and turn myself in! Imagine doing anything so damned stupid! Let’s look at the worst that can happen. Let’s suppose that in all this there is a bad deed on my part and that my conscience holds it against me one day, all we have to do is accept, for the good of others, such disapprobation as burdens me alone, this bad deed that compromises my soul alone—that’s what devotion is, that’s where virtue lies.” He got to his feet and began pacing again. This time it seemed to him that he was happy.

Diamonds are found only in the bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of reflection. It seemed to him that having descended into those depths, after groping in the blackness of the shadows for so long, he had finally found one of those diamonds, one of those truths, and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it.

“Yes,” he thought, “that’s it. I’m on the road to the truth. I’ve found the solution. You have to end up holding on to something. I’ve made my choice. Let well enough alone! No more vacillating, no more retreating! This is in everyone’s interest, not just mine; I am Madeleine, and Madeleine I remain. Too bad for the fellow who is Jean Valjean! He is no longer me. I don’t know the man, I don’t know what he is anymore; if there is someone who is Jean Valjean at this moment, let him fend for himself! It’s nothing to do with me. It’s a fateful name that floats in the night; if it stops and falls on someone’s head, too bad for that person!” He looked at himself in the little mirror over the mantelpiece and said: “See! What a relief to come to a decision! I look completely different now.” He took another few steps and then stopped short: “Wake up to yourself!” he said. “You can’t go back no matter what the consequences of the decision you’ve made. There are still a few ties that bind me to this Jean Valjean. They must be cut! Here, in this very room, there are a few objects that would point the finger at me, dumb things that would accuse me; make no bones about it, they have to go.” He felt around in his pocket, pulled out his purse, opened it and took out a small key. He fitted the key into a lock, though the keyhole was barely visible, lost as it was in the darkest shades of the design of the wallpaper on the wall. A little secret space opened, a sort of false cupboard set between the wall and the mantelpiece. There was nothing in this little hidden space but junk—a smock made of blue cloth, an old pair of trousers, an old haversack, and a big thorn stick tipped with metal at both ends. Those who had seen Jean Valjean in the days when he was passing through Digne, in October 1815, would easily have recognized all the components of this miserable fancy dress.

He had kept them just as he had kept the silver candlesticks, to remind himself always of where he had come from. Only, he hid what had come from jail and left out in the open the candlesticks that had come from the bishop.

He cast a furtive glance at the door as though he feared it might open despite the bar that held it shut tight; then with an abrupt and violent move, he grabbed in a single armful, without so much as a quick glance at them, these things he had so religiously and perilously hoarded for so many years, and took the lot, rags, stick, haversack, and threw them on the fire.

He shut the false cupboard again and, taking further precautions, now rather pointlessly since the thing was empty, he hid the door behind a heavy piece of furniture, which he pushed in front of it.

After a few seconds, the room and the wall opposite were lit by a great flickering red reflection. It was all going up in flames. The thorn stick crackled and threw out sparks right to the middle of the room.

The haversack, as it went up along with the awful rags it held, exposed something gleaming in the ashes. If you bent over, you would easily have recognized a silver coin. No doubt the forty-sou piece stolen from the little Savoyard.

He did not watch the fire; he walked, pacing to and fro in the same steady rhythm. All of a sudden his eyes fell on the two silver candlesticks that the light set gleaming faintly on the mantelpiece.

“Hang on!” he thought. “The whole of Jean Valjean is there, still, in them. They must be destroyed too.” He grabbed the two candlesticks. There was enough of a fire to swiftly deform them and melt them down into a sort of unrecognizable ingot.

He bent down to the hearth and warmed himself there for a moment. “Nice and hot!” he said.

He stirred the coals with one of the candlesticks. A minute more and they’d have been in the fire.

At that instant, he seemed to hear a voice crying out inside him: “Jean Valjean! Jean Valjean!” His hair stood on end, he froze as though he’d heard something terrible.

“Yes! That’s it! Finish the job!” said the voice. “Finish what you’ve started! Destroy the candlesticks! Obliterate the memory! Forget the bishop! Forget everything! Sink this Champmathieu character! Go on, that’s right. Give yourself a round of applause! That way, it’s fixed, it’s resolved, it’s done. Here’s a fellow, an old man, who doesn’t know what they’ve got against him, who has possibly done nothing, an innocent, whose undoing is entirely due to your name, your name is weighing on him like a crime, and he will be taken for you, he will be condemned, he will end his days in utter humiliation and in horror! Never mind. You be an upright man, you keep on being Monsieur le maire, keep on being honourable and honoured, play the hero, make the town rich, feed the poor, bring up orphans, live happily ever after, virtuous and admired, and during that time, while you’re here living in joy and in the light, someone else will have your red shirt on, someone else will bear your name in ignominy and drag your chain in jail! Yes, that’s all settled nicely, then! Ah! Miserable bastard!” Sweat trickled down his forehead. He fixed wild eyes on the candlesticks. But whatever was talking inside him had not yet done with him. The voice went on: “Jean Valjean! There will be many voices around you that will make a lot of noise, that will clamour and shout, that will bless you, and one voice that no one will hear and that will curse you in the darkness. So then, hear this, you vile creature! All the blessings will fall away before they reach heaven, and only the curse will rise as far as God!” This voice, at first quite weak and coming from the darkest recess of his conscience, had gradually become strident and frightening, and he now heard it in his ear. It seemed to him that it had come from inside him but that it was now talking from outside him. He felt he heard those last words so distinctly that he looked around the room in a sort of terror.

“Is there someone there?” he asked out loud, perfectly distraught.

Then he went on with a laugh that sounded like the laugh of a half-wit:

“What an idiot I am! There can’t be anybody there.”

There was someone there; but that someone was not among those the human eye can see.

He put the candlesticks back down on the mantelpiece.

Then he began the monotonous and grim pacing that troubled the dreams of the man below him and woke him with a start from his sleep.

Walking calmed him and excited him at the same time. It seems that in extreme situations we often move around to ask the advice of all we might encounter in our travels. After a few moments, he no longer knew where he was.

He now recoiled in equal horror from each of the decisions he had in turn made. The two ideas counselling him both seemed as disastrous as each other. What a fatal coincidence! What a turn of events, this Champmathieu being taken for him! To be mown down by the means Providence seemed to have used initially to bolster him!

There was a moment when he considered the future. Give himself up, great God! Turn himself in! He saw with immense despair all that he would have to leave, all that he would have to go through again. He would, then, have to say goodbye to this existence that was so good, so pure, so radiant, to the respect of all, to honour, to freedom. He would go no more into the fields to stroll, he would no longer hear the birds singing in the month of May, he would no longer hand out alms to the little children! He would no longer feel the looks of gratitude and love that settled on him! He would leave this house he had built, this room, this sweet little room! Everything looked lovely to him at that moment. He would no longer read from these books, he would no longer write from this little whitewood table! His old concierge, the only servant he had, would no longer bring up his coffee in the morning. Great God! Instead of that, the galley slaves, the shackles, the red shirt, the iron chain on his foot, the exhaustion, the dungeon, the camp bed, all the old familiar horrors! At his age, after having been what he was! If only he were still young! But, fancy being old and insulted by the first person to come along, to be searched by the galley guard, to be belted by the screw with a truncheon! To have his bare feet in iron-clad shoes! To hold out his leg morning and night for the hammer of the geezer who does the rounds testing the fetters! To have to put up with the curiosity of strangers to whom they would say: “That one there, that’s the famous Jean Valjean who used to be mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer!” At night, dripping with sweat, shattered by fatigue, the green cap over his eyes, to mount two by two, under the sergeant’s whip, the gangway of that floating prison! Oh, what misery! Can destiny, then, be malevolent like an intelligent being and turn monstrous like the human heart!

Do what he might, he kept returning to this thorny dilemma at the back of his mind: whether to remain in paradise and turn into a demon there, or to return to hell and there become an angel!

What to do, great God! What to do?

The torment he’d struggled so painfully free of unleashed itself once more inside him. His ideas began to get tangled up again. They assumed that indefinably dazed, mechanical quality peculiar to despair. The name Romainville kept endlessly recurring, along with two lines of a song he’d once heard. He thought that Romainville was a small wood close to Paris where young lovers went to gather lilacs in the month of April.

He tottered without as within. He stumbled around like a toddler finally allowed to walk on its own two feet.

Now and then, fighting off his weariness, he made an effort to think straight. He struggled to put into words, finally and once and for all, the problem over which he now stumbled with exhaustion. Should he give himself up? Should he keep quiet? He couldn’t manage to see anything clearly. The vague outlines of all the arguments he’d sketched in his mind trembled and broke up, one after the other, all went up in smoke. Only, he felt that, whatever side he opted for, necessarily and without his being able to escape it, something of himself would die; that he was entering a tomb, and whether he took the left turn or the right, he would undergo the final agony of death, the demise of his happiness or the demise of his virtue.

Alas! He was in the grip once more of a total lack of resolve. He was right back to square one.

And so this sorry soul went on debating with himself in anguish. Eighteen hundred years before this poor wretched man, the mysterious being in whom all the holiness and all the suffering of humanity are gathered, had also, while the olive trees were shivering in the wild wind of infinity, long pushed away with his hand the fearsome chalice that appeared to him, streaming shadow and running over with darkness in the star-filled depths.

IV. FORMS SUFFERING TAKES DURING SLEEP

THREE O’CLOCK IN the morning had just rung out and he had been pacing up and down for five hours, almost without letup, when he let himself sink into his chair.

There, he fell asleep and had a dream.

This dream, like most dreams, was only connected to the actual situation by something mysteriously forlorn and poignant, but it made an impression on him. The nightmare struck him so forcefully he later wrote it down. It is one of the notes written in his own hand that he left behind. We believe we should transcribe the thing verbatim here.

Whatever the dream, the story of that night would be incomplete if we left it out. It is the sombre adventure of a sick soul.

Here it is. On the envelope we find written this line: “The dream I dreamed that night.” I was in the countryside somewhere. Wide open gloomy country where there was no grass. It didn’t look like day or night as far as I could tell.

I was having a walk with my brother, the brother I had in my childhood, the brother I have to say I never think of and whom I hardly remember anymore.

We were chatting and we met others out walking. We were talking about a neighbour we once had who, ever since she’d moved into the street, used to always work with her window open. While we were chatting we got cold because of the open window.

There were no trees in the countryside.

We saw a man go past completely naked, the colour of ash, mounted on a horse the colour of dirt. The man had no hair; you could see his skull and the veins on his skull. He was holding a stick in his hand that was as flexible as a vine shoot and as heavy as iron. This horseman rode past and didn’t say a thing to us.

My brother said to me: “Let’s take the sunken lane.”

There was a sunken lane where you never saw a single bush or patch of moss. Everything was the colour of dirt, even the sky. After a few steps, no one answered me when I spoke. I realized my brother was no longer with me.

I walked into a village I saw. I thought it must be Romainville (why Romainville?).

The first street I went into was deserted. I took a second street. At the corner where the two streets met, a man was standing with his back against a wall. I said to this man: “What is this place? Where am I?” The man didn’t answer. I saw the door of a house open and I went in.

The first room was deserted. I went into the second. Behind the door of this room, there was a man standing against the wall. I asked this man: “Whose house is this? Where am I?” The man didn’t answer. The house had a garden.

I went out of the house and into the garden. The garden was deserted. Behind the first tree, I found a man standing. I said to this man: “What is this garden? Where am I?” The man didn’t answer.

I wandered about the village and I saw that it was a town. All the streets were deserted, all the doors were open. Not one living being passed in the streets, or walked in the rooms, or strolled about the gardens. But behind every corner of wall, behind every door, behind every tree, there was a man standing who held his tongue. You never saw more than one of them at a time. These men watched me going past.

I left the town and began to walk through the fields.

After a while, I turned round and I saw a great crowd coming behind me. I recognized all the men that I’d seen in the town. They had strange heads. They didn’t seem to be in any hurry and yet they were walking faster than I was. They didn’t make a sound as they walked. In an instant, the mob had caught up with me and surrounded me. The faces of the men were the colour of dirt.

Then the first man I saw and questioned when I entered the town said to me: “Where are you going? Don’t you know you’ve been dead a long time?” I opened my mouth to reply and realized there was no one around me.

He woke up. He was freezing. A wind as cold as the early morning was causing the window, which was still open, to rock and rattle in its frame. The fire had gone out. The candle was burned virtually to the bottom. It was still the dead of night.

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

From his window he could see the courtyard in front of the house and the street. A hard dry sound that rang out suddenly from the ground made him look down.

He saw below him two red stars whose rays flickered long and then short, long and short, bizarrely, in the dark.

As his mind was still submerged in the fog of his dream:

“Hang on!” he thought. “There aren’t any stars in the sky. Now they’re on the ground.” But this confusion swiftly cleared and a second noise like the first managed to wake him up; he peered out and he recognized that the two stars were the lanterns of a carriage. In the light they threw out, he could make out the shape of the carriage. It was a tilbury attached to a small white horse. The noise he had heard was the horse’s hooves stamping on the pavement.

“What the hell is that carriage doing here?” he wondered. “Who’s turned up so early in the morning?” At that moment someone knocked gently on the door of his room.

He shivered from head to toe and cried out in a frightening voice: “Who’s there?”

Someone answered: “Me, Monsieur le maire.”

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

“Well,” he said, “what’s wrong?”

“Monsieur le maire, it’s just on five o’clock.”

“What do I care?”

“Monsieur le maire, the cabriolet is here.”

“What cabriolet?”

“The tilbury.”

“What tilbury?”

“Didn’t Monsieur le maire ask for a tilbury?”

“No,” he said.

“The driver says he’s come for Monsieur le maire.”

“What driver?”

“Monsieur Scaufflaire’s driver.”

“Monsieur Scaufflaire?”

The name made him flinch as though a streak of lightning had flashed in his face.

“Ah, yes!” he said. “Monsieur Scaufflaire.”

If the old woman could have seen him at that moment, she would have been terrified.

There was a rather long silence. He studied the flame of the candle with his mouth hanging open like an imbecile and he pinched some of the molten wax around the wick and rolled it in his fingers. The old woman waited. Then she took the risk of raising her voice a little: “Monsieur le maire, what am I supposed to say?” “Say everything’s fine and I’ll be right down.”

V. A SPOKE IN THE WHEELS

THE POSTAL SERVICE between Arras and Montreuil-sur-mer was still conducted at that time by little mail coaches dating from the days of the Empire. These mail coaches were two-wheeled cabriolets upholstered inside in tawny buckskin; they were suspended on pump-springs and had just two seats—one for the postman, the other for the traveller. The wheels were fitted with those offensive long hubs that keep other cabs at a distance and that you can still see on the roads of Germany today. The chest for the post was a huge oblong box stuck behind the carriage and coupled with it. This chest was painted black and the carriage, yellow.

You don’t see anything like those carriages these days; there was something deformed and humped about them, and whenever you saw them trundling by in the distance or crawling along some road on the horizon, they looked like those insects known, I think, as termites, which have skinny thoraxes that drag great abdomens along behind them. Yet they got along at quite a clip. The mail coach left Arras every night at one, after the mail from Paris had passed, and arrived in Montreuil-sur-mer a bit before five in the morning.

That particular night, just as the mail coach that went down into Montreuil-sur-mer by the Hesdin road was turning the corner and coming into town, it ran into a little tilbury pulled by a white horse going in the opposite direction and with just one person in it, a man wrapped up in a coat. The tilbury’s wheel took quite a shock. The postman shouted to the man to stop, but the traveller wouldn’t hear of it and went on his way at a rapid trot.

“There’s a man with only a minute to live!” said the postman to himself.

The man hurrying away was the same man we’ve just seen wrestling with himself in convulsions surely worthy of pity.

Where was he going? He could not have said. Why was he in such a hurry? He did not know. He was moving forward—aimlessly. Where to? To Arras, no doubt; but maybe he was going somewhere else, too. At times, he thought so, and he shuddered.

He sank into the darkness as though sliding down into a yawning chasm. Something was pushing him, something was pulling him. What was going on inside him, no one could have said, yet anyone could understand. What man has not, at least once in his life, plummeted into that dark cave of the unknown?

Besides, he had resolved nothing, decided nothing, stopped nothing, done nothing. None of his acts of conscience had been definitive. More than ever, he was back where he began.

Why was he going to Arras?

He went back over what he had already told himself when he booked the cabriolet from Scaufflaire: that, whatever the consequences might be, it wouldn’t hurt to see things with his own eyes, judge things for himself; that this was only prudent, in fact, that he had to know what would happen; that he couldn’t make any decision without having observed and scrutinized; that a person made mountains out of molehills at a distance; that, at the end of the day, when he’d seen this Champmathieu, whatever the poor bastard was, his conscience would probably be only too relieved to see him carted off to the clink in his stead; that, in all likelihood, Javert would be there and Brevet, and Chenildieu, and Cochepaille, ex-convicts who had known him, but that they would certainly not recognize him—Ha! The very idea!; that Javert was way off the scent; that all conjectures and suppositions were pinned on this Champmathieu, and that nothing could be harder to shift than suppositions and conjectures; and so, that there was no real danger.

He also thought that it was undoubtedly a dark hour, but that he would get through it; that, after all, he held his fate, however bad it might be, in his hands; that he was the master of it. He clung to that thought.

At bottom, if the truth be known, he’d have preferred not to go to Arras.

Yet that’s where he was going.

Churning things over all the while, he whipped the horse, which was trotting along at a strong and steady pace that enabled them to make two and a half leagues an hour. The further the cabriolet went, the more he felt something inside him shrink.

At daybreak he was in the open countryside; the town of Montreuil-sur-mer was far enough behind him. He watched the horizon whiten; he watched, without seeing, all the chilling features of a winter dawn passing before his eyes. Morning has its ghosts just as night does. He did not see them but, unwittingly, and through almost a kind of physical osmosis, the black silhouettes of trees and hills added something inexpressibly mournful and sinister to the convulsive state of his soul.

Every time he passed one of those secluded houses that sometimes sit right next to the road, he said to himself: You wouldn’t credit it, and yet, there are people in there sleeping!

The horse’s trot, the harness bells, the wheels on the pavement, made a soft monotonous sound. Such things are lovely when you are full of joy and forlorn as can be when you are downhearted.

It was broad daylight by the time he reached Hesdin. He pulled up in front of an inn to let the horse get his breath and get him some oats.

The horse was, as Scaufflaire had said, one of the small-sized Boulonnais breed with too much of a head, too much of a gut, and not enough of a neck, but with an open chest, a good wide rump, a fine, neat leg, and a firm foot; an ugly breed, but a robust and healthy one. The excellent beast had done five leagues in two hours and there was not a drop of sweat on his rump.

He did not get down from the tilbury. The young stable hand who brought the oats knelt down suddenly and examined the left wheel.

“Have you got a long trip ahead of you in this?” the boy said. He responded, almost as though he were still lost in thought: “Why?” “Have you come a long way?” the boy plowed on.

“Five leagues.”

“Ah!”

“Why do you say ‘ah’?”

The boy bent down again, said nothing for a moment, his gaze riveted on the wheel, then stood up and said: “It’s just that if that wheel’s just done five leagues—and it’s possible at a pinch—it won’t do another quarter of a league, that’s for sure.” He leaped down from the tilbury.

“What are you saying, my friend?”

“I’m saying that it’s a miracle you went five leagues without taking a tumble, you and your horse, into a ditch on the highway. Have a look.” The wheel was, indeed, seriously damaged. The shock of the mail chest had split two spokes and loosened the hub so that the nut had worked its way out.

“My friend,” he said to the stable hand, “is there a wheelwright around here?”

“Naturally, Monsieur.”

“Do me a favour and go and get him.”

“He’s just there, two feet away. Coo-ee! Master Bourgaillard!”

Master Bourgaillard, the wheelwright, was standing on his doorstep. He came and examined the wheel and made a grimace like a surgeon looking at a broken leg.

“Can you fix the wheel right away?”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

“When can I get going again?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!”

“There’s a full day’s work there. Is Monsieur in a hurry?”

“In a great hurry. I have to get going again in an hour at the latest.”

“Not possible, Monsieur.”

“I’ll pay whatever you want.”

“Not possible!”

“Well, then! Two hours.”

“Not possible today. There’re two spokes and a hub to repair. Monsieur can’t set off again before tomorrow.” “My business can’t wait till tomorrow. What if you don’t repair the wheel and replace it instead?” “How can I do that?”

“You’re a wheelwright, aren’t you?”

“I certainly am, Monsieur.”

“Haven’t you got a wheel you could sell me? I could start out again at once.”

“A replacement wheel?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have a wheel ready-made for your cabriolet. Two wheels don’t just fit together willy-nilly.” “In that case, sell me a pair of wheels.”

“Monsieur, all wheels don’t just fit all axles.”

“Give it a try, anyway.”

“There’s no point, Monsieur. I’ve only got cartwheels for sale. This is the sticks, here.” “Would you have a cabriolet I could hire?”

The master wheelwright had seen at a glance that the tilbury was a hire-car. He shrugged his shoulders.

“You certainly know how to look after the cabriolets you hire! Even if I had one, I wouldn’t let you rent it.” “Well then, sell it to me.”

“I haven’t got one.”

“What! Not even a cariole? I’m not hard to please, as you can see.”

“This is the sticks, here. I do have an old barouche under cover over there,” the wheelwright added. “It belongs to a burgher in town who gave it to me to look after; he only uses it once in a blue moon. I’d let you have that for hire, what’s it to me? But the burgher mustn’t see it going past; and then again, it’s a barouche, you’d need two horses.” “I’ll take two post-horses.”

“Where is Monsieur off to?”

“Arras.”

“And Monsieur wants to get there today?”

“I certainly do.”

“With post-horses?”

“Why not?”

“Does Monsieur mind if he gets there overnight—at four in the morning?”

“No, of course not.”

“It’s just that, you see, there’s something that has to be said about taking post-horses … Does Monsieur have his passport?” “Yes.”

“Well, then, if Monsieur takes post-horses, he won’t get to Arras before tomorrow. We’re a crossroads, here. The relays aren’t manned, the horses are in the fields. The plowing season’s starting, you need good strong teams under yoke and they’re grabbing horses left, right, and centre, from the post just the same as anywhere else. Monsieur will have to wait for three or four horses at every relay. And then, they’ll only go pretty slowly. There are so many uphill stretches to climb.” “All right, I’ll go on horseback. Unhitch the cabriolet. Surely someone in this place can sell me a saddle.” “Of course, but will this horse let you saddle him?”

“That’s right, you’ve just reminded me: he won’t.”

“Well …”

“But surely I can find a horse for hire in the village?”

“A horse to do the trip to Arras in one go!”

“That’s right.”

“You’d need a better horse than you’ll see in this neck of the woods. You’d have to buy it first, because we don’t know you from Adam. But there’s nothing for sale, nothing for hire, not for five hundred francs, and not for a thousand, neither. You won’t find one!” “What can I do?”

“The best thing, if you’re going to be sensible about it, is for me to fix the wheel and for you to put your trip back till tomorrow.” “Tomorrow will be too late.”

“Jesus!”

“Isn’t there a mail coach that goes to Arras? When does it come through?”

“Tomorrow night. Both the mail coaches run at night, the one going up as well as the one going down.” “And it will really take you a day to fix the wheel?”

“A day, and a full day at that!”

“What if you put two workers on it?”

“It’d take ten!”

“What if we tied the spokes with rope?”

“The spokes, all right; the hub, no go. Then again, the rim’s in a bad way, too.”

“Is there a car-hire place in town?”

“No.”

“Is there another wheelwright?”

The stable boy and the wheelwright answered at the same time, shaking their heads.

“No.”

He felt a great rush of joy.

It was obvious Providence had a hand in this. It was Providence that had busted the wheel of the tilbury and stopped him en route. He had not given up at the first sign of trouble; he had just done all he could to continue on his way. He had faithfully and scrupulously exhausted every means; he had not shrunk either before the season or before fatigue or before the expense; he had nothing to reproach himself with. If he were to go no further, it would not worry him. It was no longer his fault; it was not an act of his own volition but an act of God.

He breathed. He breathed freely and filled his lungs for the first time since Javert’s visit. It felt as if the iron fist that had squeezed his heart for the last twenty hours had just let go.

It felt as if God was now on his side, and was making it known.

He told himself he’d done everything he could and that now all he had to do was go back the way he’d come, quietly.

If his conversation with the wheelwright had taken place in a room at the inn, there would have been no witnesses, no one would have heard it, things would have been left at that, and it is quite likely that we would not have to relate any of the events you are going to read about. But this conversation took place in the street. Any talk in the street inevitably gathers a circle of people. There are always people crying out to be spectators. While he was questioning the wheelwright, a few passersby had stopped around them. After listening in for a few minutes, one young lad, whom no one had taken any notice of, broke away from the group and ran off.

The very moment the traveller ended the inner debate we have just detailed and decided to go back the way he had come, the boy returned. He was accompanied by an old woman.

“Monsieur,” said the woman, “my boy tells me you’re after a cabriolet to rent.”

Those simple words, uttered by an old woman shepherded by a child, caused sweat to trickle down his back. He felt as if he could see the hand that had just released him reappear in the gloom behind him, ready to grab him again.

He answered: “Yes, my good woman, I am looking for a cabriolet to rent.” And he hastened to add: “But there aren’t any around here.” “Yes there are,” said the old woman.

“Where’s that, then?” the wheelwright chipped in.

“At my place,” replied the old woman.

He shivered. The fatal hand gripped him once more.

The old woman did, in fact, have a kind of wicker cariole in her shed. The wheelwright and the stable boy from the inn, sorry to see the traveller escape their clutches, stepped in. It was a dreadful old boneshaker, just a box plonked on top of the bare axle—no springs; the seats were actually hung inside from strips of leather, the rain got in, the wheels were rusty and eaten away with damp, it wouldn’t go much farther than the tilbury, a real rattletrap! The monsieur would be making a dreadful mistake to set out in it. And so on and so forth.

All the above was true, but this boneshaker, this rattletrap, this thing, whatever it was, rolled along on its two wheels and could make it to Arras.

He paid the asking price, left the tilbury at the wheelwright’s for repair to be picked up on his return trip, had the white horse harnessed to the cariole, hopped up and went on his way, following the road he’d been on since early morning.

The moment the cart lurched forward, he confessed to himself that a minute before he had felt a certain joy at the thought that he would not get where he was going. He examined this joy with a sort of fury and found it absurd. Why rejoice at going backward? After all, he was making this trip of his own free will. No one was forcing him to do it. And, naturally, nothing would happen that he didn’t want to happen.

As he was leaving Hesdin, he heard a voice shouting: “Stop! Stop!” He pulled the cart up with a sharp jerk that still had something strangely feverish and convulsive about it resembling hope.

It was the little boy who belonged to the old woman.

“Monsieur,” he said, “I’m the one who got you this cart.”

“Right!”

“You didn’t give me anything.”

He who gave to everyone, and so easily, found this claim exorbitant and almost vile.

“Ah! So it was you, you little rascal?” he said. “You won’t get a thing!”

He whipped the horse and galloped off hard.

He had lost a lot of time in Hesdin and wanted to make it up. The little horse was brave and pulled like two; but they were in the month of February, it had rained and the roads were bad. And then, it was not the tilbury now. The cart was hard and very heavy. On top of this, there were lots of hills.

It took him nearly four hours to get from Hesdin to Saint-Pol. Four hours to do five leagues.

At Saint-Pol he unharnessed the horse at the first inn he came to and had the horse taken to the stable. Just as he had promised Scaufflaire, he stayed close to the hayrack while the horse was eating. His mind was on sad and confused things.

The wife of the innkeeper came into the stable.

“Wouldn’t Monsieur like something to eat?”

“Heavens, it’s true,” he said, “I’ve actually worked up quite an appetite.”

He followed the woman, who had a fresh, happy face. She led him into a low room where there were tables with oilskins for tablecloths.

“Please be quick,” he said. “I have to set out again. I’m in a hurry.”

A fat Flemish servant promptly set the table for him. He watched the girl with a feeling of well-being.

“That was what was wrong with me,” he thought. “I didn’t have anything to eat.”

He was served. He fell on the bread, bit a great mouthful off, then slowly put the bread back on the table and did not touch it again.

A cart driver was eating at another table. He said to the man: “Why is the bread here so bitter?” The cart driver was German and didn’t understand.

He went back to the stable and over to the horse.

An hour later, he was out of Saint-Pol heading for Tinques, which is only five leagues from Arras.

What did he do during this part of the trip? What was he thinking? Just as he had done that morning, he watched the trees go by, the thatched roofs, the fields under cultivation, and the vanishing stretches of the landscape shifting at every bend in the road. This is a kind of contemplation that sometimes satisfies the soul and almost allows it to dispense with thinking. To see a thousand things for the first time and for the last—what could be more melancholy or more profound! To travel is to be born and to die at every instant. Perhaps, in the most shadowy part of his mind, he was making connections between those shifting horizons and human existence itself. Everything in life is constantly fleeing in a headlong rush ahead of us. Things cloud over and clear as part and parcel of the same process: first dazzlement, then eclipse; you look, you rush around, you hold out your hands to seize what is passing; every event is a bend in the road; and then, all of a sudden, you’re old. You feel a sort of jolt, everything is black, you make out a dim doorway, that sombre horse of life that was dragging you along stops and you see someone veiled and unknown unharness it in the shadows.

Twilight was falling just as children coming out of school saw the traveller driving into Tinques. For it was, of course, still that time of year when the days are short. He did not stop in Tinques. As he was driving out of the village, a road-mender laying stones on the road raised his head and said: “That’s a tired horse for you.” The poor creature was, in fact, going no faster than a walk.

“Are you headed for Arras?” the road-mender added.

“Yes.”

“If you keep going at that pace you won’t get there too early.”

He stopped the horse and asked the man: “How much further is it from here to Arras?” “A good seven leagues, just about.”

“How do you work that out? The post book has it down as five and a quarter leagues.” “Ah!” the road-mender went on. “So you don’t know the road is under repair? You’ll find it cut off a quarter of an hour from here. No way you can go any further.” “Really?”

“You take the left, the road that goes to Carency, you cross the river; and, when you get to Camblain, you turn right; that’s the Mont-Saint-Éloy road that goes to Arras.” “But night’s coming. I’ll get lost.”

“You’re not from around here?”

“No.”

“And they’re all back roads, too. Wait a minute, Monsieur,” the man went on, “do you want my advice? Your horse is weary, go back to Tinques. There’s a good inn there. Have a sleep. You’ll go to Arras tomorrow.” “I have to be there tonight.”

“That’s different. Well, go back all the same to the inn and take a fresh horse. The boy that comes with the horse will guide you through all the back roads.” He followed the road-mender’s advice and went back the way he’d come, and half an hour later he was going past the same spot again, but at quite a gallop, with a good fresh horse. A stable boy who styled himself a postilion was perched on the shaft of the cart.

Yet he felt he was losing time. It was now completely dark.

They turned off into the back roads. The road surface was terrible. The cart fell into one rut after another. He said to the postilion: “Keep up the pace and you get double the tip.” During one of the judders, the singletree broke.

“Monsieur,” said the postilion, “the singletree’s gone and broken, I don’t know how to hitch up my horse. This road is pretty awful at night; if you’d like to come back and sleep in Tinques, we could be in Arras early tomorrow morning.” He replied: “Have you got a bit of rope and a knife?”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

He cut off the branch of a tree and turned it into a singletree.

It meant losing another twenty minutes; but then they set out again at a gallop.

The plain was in darkness. Low thick black mists crept up the hillsides and tore away from them like smoke. There were pale streaks of light in the clouds. A great wind coming in from the sea made a noise like someone moving furniture around all along the horizon. Everything that you could make out in the darkness looked to be terror-stricken. So many things shudder under the blast of the immense breaths of night!

The cold cut him to the bone. He hadn’t eaten since the day before. He dimly remembered his other nocturnal trip on the great plain not far from Digne. That was eight years ago; yet it seemed to him only yesterday.

A distant bell struck the hour. He asked the boy: “What time is it?”

“Seven o’clock, Monsieur. We’ll be in Arras by eight. We’ve only got three leagues to go.” At that instant something occurred to him for the first time and he found it odd that he hadn’t thought of it before: that it was perhaps pointless, all this trouble he was going to; that he didn’t even know what time the trial was on; that he might, at least, have found out about that; that it was mad to go on like this without knowing if it would serve any purpose. Then he made a few calculations in his head: that normally the sessions of the circuit courts began at nine o’clock in the morning; that this particular matter would probably not take long; that a case of apple stealing would be over in a jiffy; that it would be just a question of identity after that; four or five statements, nothing much the lawyers could say; that he was going to get there when it was all over!

The postilion whipped the horses. They had crossed the river and left Mont-Saint-Éloy behind them.

Night grew deeper and deeper.

VI. SISTER SIMPLICE IS PUT TO THE TEST

MEANWHILE, AT THAT very moment, Fantine was delirious with joy.

She had had a very bad night. Hideous cough, galloping fever; and she had had dreams. In the morning, when the doctor dropped in, she was delirious. She seemed alarmed and asked them to tell her as soon as Monsieur Madeleine arrived.

The whole morning she was distraught, said little, and made pleats in the sheets while murmuring figures softly to herself that sounded like they were calculations of distance. Her eyes were hollow and staring. They seemed almost to have gone out and then, at times, they lit up again and shone like stars. It would seem that at the approach of a certain dark hour, the brightness of the sky fills those who are leaving the brightness of the earth.

Every time Sister Simplice asked her how she felt, she invariably answered: “Good. I’d like to see Monsieur Madeleine.” Some months previously, at the time that Fantine had lost what was left of her modesty, what was left of her shame, what was left of her happiness, she had been a shadow of her former self; now she was a ghost of her former self. Physical suffering had finished the job of moral suffering. This creature only twenty-five years old had a forehead covered in wrinkles, flaccid cheeks, pinched nostrils, receding gums, a greyish complexion, a skinny neck, protruding collarbones, withered limbs, sallow skin, and her blond hair showed grey at the roots. Alas! That’s how suffering improvises on old age!

At midday, the doctor came back, wrote out a few prescriptions, inquired as to whether Monsieur le maire had turned up yet at the infirmary, and shook his head.

Monsieur Madeleine usually came at three o’clock to see the sick woman. As punctuality was part of goodness, he was punctual.

Close to two-thirty, Fantine began to get agitated. In the space of twenty minutes, she asked the nun more than ten times: “Sister, what time is it?” The clock struck three. At the third stroke Fantine sat bolt upright, she who normally could barely move in her bed; she joined her two bony yellowed hands together in a sort of convulsive clasp, and the nun heard one of those deep sighs issue from her chest that seem to lift a great weight, release despair. Then Fantine turned and looked at the door.

No one came in; the door did not open.

She stayed in this position for a quarter of an hour, her eye fixed on the door, not moving and as though holding her breath. The sister didn’t dare speak to her. The church struck a quarter past three. Fantine let herself fall back on the pillow.

She didn’t say a word and began to pleat the sheet again.

The half hour went by, then the hour. No one came. Every time the clock struck, Fantine pushed herself up and looked toward the door, then fell back again.

It was obvious what she was thinking, but she did not utter a name. She did not complain, she did not accuse. Only, she coughed, horribly. You would have said something dark was battening down on her. She was livid and her lips were blue. At times, she smiled.

Five o’clock struck. The sister then heard her say, very softly and sweetly:

“But since I’m going away tomorrow, it’s wrong of him not to come today!”

Sister Simplice herself was surprised that Monsieur Madeleine hadn’t yet turned up.

Meanwhile Fantine was gazing at the canopy over her bed. She looked as though she were trying to remember something. Suddenly she began to sing in a voice as weak as a breath. The nun listened. This is what Fantine sang: We’ll buy some beautiful things

As we stroll down the boulevards.

Roses are red, violets are blue,

Violets are blue and my love is true.

The Virgin Mary next to my stove

Came to see me yesterday in a brocade coat

And said: Here, hidden beneath my veil

The little one you once asked me for.

Run to town, get some cloth,

Buy some thread, buy a thimble.

We’ll buy some beautiful things

As we stroll down the boulevards.

Good Holy Virgin, next to my stove

I’ve done a cradle up with ribbons.

God could give me his brightest star,

I prefer the baby you gave me by far.

“My Lady, what will I do with the cloth?”

“Make a trousseau for my newborn babe.”

Roses are red, violets are blue,

Violets are blue, my love is true.

“Wash the cloth.” “But where?” “In the river.

Make it, without spoiling it or dirtying it,

Into a pretty skirt with a chemise

Which I’ll embroider all over with flowers.”

“The baby’s gone, My Lady, what will I do?”

“Make it into a shroud to bury me in.”

We’ll buy some beautiful things

As we stroll down the boulevards.

Roses are red, violets are blue,

Violets are blue, my love is true.1

This song was an old nursery rhyme she used to sing in bygone days to rock her little Cosette to sleep, and it hadn’t sprung to mind in all the five years she no longer had her baby with her. She sang it in a voice so sad and so sweet that it would make even a nun weep. The sister, accustomed to austerity, felt a tear well in her eye.

The clock struck six. Fantine didn’t seem to hear. She didn’t seem to notice anything around her anymore.

Sister Simplice sent a servant girl off to ask the concierge at Monsieur le maire’s workshop if he had returned and if he would not shortly come to the infirmary. The girl was back in a flash.

Fantine still had not moved and seemed to be absorbed in her own thoughts.

The servant told Sister Simplice in a whisper that Monsieur le maire had left that same morning before six o’clock in a little tilbury harnessed to a white horse, freezing as it was, that he had set out alone, without even a driver, that no one knew what road he’d taken, that some people said they saw him take the Arras turn, that others reckoned they passed him on the road to Paris. That, as he went off, he was very sweet as usual and that all he said to the concierge was not to wait up for him that night.

While the two women were whispering with their backs turned to Fantine’s bed, the sister asking questions and the servant speculating, Fantine, with the feverish vivacity certain organic diseases produce, combining vigorous healthy motion with the dreadful cadaverousness of death, had got to her knees on the bed, with her two clenched fists pressed into the bolster for support, and poking her head through the gap in the curtains, she strained to hear. Suddenly she yelled: “You’re talking about Monsieur Madeleine there! Why are you whispering? What’s he doing? Why isn’t he coming?” Her voice was so harsh and so hoarse that the two women felt they were hearing a man’s voice; they whirled around, frightened.

“Well, answer me!” cried Fantine.

The servant stammered: “The concierge told me he couldn’t come today.”

“My child,” said the sister, “stay calm, lie back down.”

Fantine didn’t move a hair, but only yelled loudly and in a tone at once imperious and harrowing: “He can’t come? Why not? You know the reason. You were whispering it amongst yourselves. I want to know.” The servant hastened to whisper in the nun’s ear: “Say he’s busy with the municipal council.” Sister Simplice went a bit red; what the servant was suggesting was that she tell a lie. On the other hand, it did seem to her that telling the sick woman the truth would no doubt be dealing her a tremendous blow and that that would be dangerous in the state Fantine was in. Her blush did not last long. The sister turned her steady, sad eyes on Fantine, and said: “Monsieur le maire has gone away.” Fantine shot up and sat on her heels. Her eyes were glittering. An incredible sense of joy shone out of that painful face.

“Gone away!” she cried. “He’s gone to get Cosette!”

Then she raised her hands to the heavens and her whole face expressed ineffable happiness. Her lips moved; she was softly praying.

When her prayer was done, she said: “Sister, I would like to lie down again now; I’ll do whatever you like. A moment ago, I was bad, please forgive me for shouting, it’s very bad to shout, I’m well aware of that, my good sister, but as you see, I’m very happy now. God is good, Monsieur Madeleine is good. Just think—he’s gone to get my little Cosette in Montfermeil.” She lay down again, helped the nun arrange her pillow, and kissed a little silver cross that she had round her neck and that Sister Simplice had given her.

“My child,” said the sister, “try to rest now, don’t talk anymore.”

Fantine took the sister’s hand in hers, which were so clammy it hurt the sister to feel the sweat.

“He left this morning to go to Paris. You don’t even need to go through Paris, actually. Montfermeil is a bit to the left on the way there. Do you remember how he said to me yesterday when I was talking to him about Cosette: Soon, soon? He wants to give me a surprise. You know, he got me to sign a letter to get her away from the Thénardiers. There’s nothing they can do, is there? They’ll hand Cosette over. Since they’ve got their money. Sister, don’t tell me I mustn’t talk. I am so happy, I feel very well, I don’t feel any more pain at all, I’m going to see Cosette again, I even feel quite hungry. It’s nearly five years since I’ve seen her. You can’t imagine what a hold children have over you! And then, she’ll be so nice, you’ll see! If you only knew, she has such pretty little pink fingers! First thing, she’s going to have very beautiful hands. When she was a year old, her hands were ridiculous. So! … She must be big now. She’s seven years old. She’s a young lady. I call her Cosette, but her real name is Euphrasie. Listen, only this morning, I was looking at the dust on the mantelpiece and I had a feeling I’d see Cosette again soon. My God! It’s so wrong to let years go by without seeing your children! A person ought to realize that life is not forever! Oh, how good of Monsieur le maire to have gone himself! It’s true, it’s very cold! Did he have his coat, at least? He’ll be here tomorrow, won’t he? Tomorrow we’ll have a party. Tomorrow morning, sister, remind me to put on my little cap with the lace on it. Montfermeil is in the country. I did that road on foot, once upon a time. For me it was a long way. But coaches go so fast! He’ll be here tomorrow with Cosette. How far away is Montfermeil from here?” The sister, who had no idea of distances, replied: “Oh, I’m sure he can be back here tomorrow.” “Tomorrow! Tomorrow!” said Fantine. “I’ll see Cosette tomorrow! You see, my good sister who belongs to our good Lord, I’m not sick anymore. I’m mad with joy. I’d get up and dance if anyone wanted me to.” Anyone who had seen her a quarter of an hour earlier would not have believed their eyes. She was not quite so flushed, she spoke in a natural, lively voice, her whole face was one big smile. At times she laughed as she muttered to herself. A mother’s joy is almost the same as a child’s joy.

“Well,” said the nun, “look how happy you are now, so do as I say and don’t talk anymore.” Fantine laid her head on the pillow and said in a tiny voice: “Yes, lie down again, be good since you’re going to see your little girl. She’s right, Sister Simplice. All of them here are right.” And then, without moving a muscle, without shifting her head, she looked all around her with her eyes wide open and an air of joy and she said nothing more.

The sister closed the curtains hoping she would doze off.

Between seven and eight, the doctor came. Not hearing any sound, he thought Fantine was sleeping, so he tiptoed quietly in and silently approached the bed. He pulled the curtains back a little and by the light of the rushlight he saw Fantine’s great calm eyes watching him.

She said to him: “Monsieur, they will, won’t they, let me put her to bed beside me in a little cot, won’t they?” The doctor thought she was delirious. She added: “Just look, there’s just enough room.” The doctor took Sister Simplice aside and she explained the situation to him—how Monsieur Madeleine was away for a day or two, and how, in their doubtfulness, they had not thought it necessary to disillusion the poor sick woman who believed Monsieur le maire had gone off to Montfermeil; how it was just possible, in a word, that she had guessed right. The doctor approved.

He went back to Fantine’s bed and she went on: “It’s just that, you see, in the morning, when she wakes up, I can say hello to the poor little bunny, and at night, since I don’t sleep, I can listen to her sleeping. Her breathing is so faint and sweet, it’ll do me good.” “Give me your hand,” said the doctor.

She held out her arm and laughed out loud as she cried: “Ah, heavens, that’s right! You don’t know! The thing is, I’m cured. Cosette’ll be here tomorrow.” The doctor was startled. She was better. Her breathing was lighter. Her pulse was stronger again. This poor worn-out creature suddenly had a new lease on life.

“Doctor,” she went on, “did sister tell you that Monsieur le maire’s gone to get my little scallywag?” The doctor advised silence and avoidance of any painful emotion. He prescribed an infusion of pure quinine and, if she became feverish again overnight, a soothing potion. As he was leaving, he said to the sister: “She’s better. If by some happy chance Monsieur le maire does turn up tomorrow with the child, who knows? There are some amazing recoveries, great joy has been seen to put an end to disease. I know this one is an organic disease and fairly well advanced, but it’s all such a mystery, all that! Perhaps we will save her, after all.”

VII. THE TRAVELLER ARRIVES ONLY TO GET READY TO LEAVE AGAIN

IT WAS NEARLY eight o’clock at night when the cart we left on the road drove through the carriage entrance of the Hôtel de la Poste in Arras. The man we followed up to this moment hopped down, responded absentmindedly to the eager attentiveness of the inn people, sent back the extra horse and led the little white horse to the stable himself; then he pushed open the door of a billiard room on the ground floor, took a seat there, and propped his elbows on a table. He had taken fourteen hours to do a trip he had counted on doing in six. To be fair to himself he admitted that it was not his fault; but in his heart of hearts, he was not sorry.

The hotel landlady came in.

“Does Monsieur need to sleep? Will Monsieur have supper?”

He shook his head in the negative.

“The stable boy says Monsieur’s horse is extremely tired!”

Here he broke his silence.

“Won’t the horse be able to set off again tomorrow?”

“Oh, Monsieur! He needs at least two days off.”

He asked: “The post office is here, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

The hostess took him to the office; he showed his passport and asked if it was possible for him to go back to Montreuil-sur-mer by mail coach that same night; as luck would have it, the seat next to the postman was free; he reserved it and paid for it.

“Monsieur,” said the post office clerk, “make sure you’re back here ready to leave at one o’clock sharp in the morning.”

That taken care of, he left the hotel and began to walk around the town.

He did not know Arras, the streets were dingy, and he wandered around aimlessly. Yet he seemed determined not to ask directions from any passersby. He crossed the little river Crinchon and found himself in a maze of narrow streets where he got lost. A bourgeois was making his way with a lantern. After some hesitation, he decided to speak to this man, but not without first looking in front and behind, as though he were frightened someone might overhear the question he was about to ask.

“Monsieur,” he said, “the Palais de Justice, please?”

“You’re not a local, Monsieur?” replied the burgher, who was a fairly old man. “Well now, follow me. I just so happen to be going close to the law courts, actually, to the prefecture building next door. They’re doing some work on the law courts at the moment, so the hearings are being held temporarily in the prefecture.” “Is that,” he asked, “where the circuit court is sitting?”

“No doubt, Monsieur. You see, what is now the prefecture used to be the bishop’s palace before the Revolution. Monsieur de Conzié,1 who was bishop in ‘82, had a big reception room built there. It’s in that room that the court is sitting.” As they walked along, the burgher said to him: “If Monsieur is hoping to sit in on a trial, he’s a bit late. Normally sessions finish at six.” But as they reached the big square, the burgher pointed out four tall windows lit up along the façade of a huge gloomy building.

“Well, blow me down, Monsieur, if you haven’t got here in time. You’re in luck. You see those four windows? That’s the circuit court. The light’s on. So it’s not over. The thing must have dragged on and they’re having an evening session. Are you interested in this case? Is it a criminal trial? Are you a witness?” He replied: “I haven’t come for any case, I’m only here to speak to a lawyer.”

“That’s different,” said the burgher. “Look, Monsieur, there’s the door. Where the guard is. All you have to do is go up the main staircase.” He stuck to the man’s directions and a few minutes later he was in the room that was jammed with people and where lawyers in their robes were huddled together here and there among the crowd, whispering.

It always causes your heart to lurch, seeing these clusters of men in black murmuring among themselves sotto voce on the threshold of courts of law. It is rare that charity and pity emerge from all those words. What emerges most often is sentences handed down in advance, foregone conclusions. To the casual observer who lets his imagination run, all these men in groups huddled together look like so many sinister beehives where certain kinds of mind buzz away, building all kinds of bleak constructions together.

The room, though spacious, was illuminated by a single lamp; it had once been the bishop’s antechamber but was being used as a waiting room for prisoners. A double door, closed at that moment, separated it from the great chamber where the circuit court was sitting.

It was so dark that he wasn’t frightened of addressing the first lawyer he came to.

“Monsieur,” he said, “where are we up to?”

“It’s over,” said the lawyer.

“Over!”

This word had been repeated in such a tone that the lawyer turned around.

“Forgive me, Monsieur, you are, perhaps, a relative?”

“No. I don’t know anyone here. And was there a sentence?”

“Naturally. It could scarcely be otherwise.”

“Hard labour?”

“In perpetuity.”

He went on in a voice so weak, he could barely be heard: “So his identity was confirmed?”

“Whose identity?” demanded the lawyer. “There was no identity to confirm. It was an open-and-shut case. The woman had murdered her child, infanticide was proved, the jury ruled out premeditation, she was sentenced to life.” “It’s a woman, then?” he said.

“But of course. The Limousin girl. What are you getting at?”

“Nothing. But since it’s over, how come the light’s still on in the room?”

“It’s for the other case that started about two hours ago.”

“What other case?”

“Oh! This one’s clear too. Some poor swine, a recidivist, a galley slave, who committed some kind of robbery. I can’t quite remember his name. But I tell you, if anyone looked like a proper bandit, this one does. I’d send him to the galleys on the strength of his face alone.” “Monsieur,” he said, “is there any way of getting into the room?”

“I really don’t think so. It’s pretty packed. But they’re taking a break just now. A few people have stepped out, so you could see what happens when the hearing resumes.” “How do you get in?”

“Through the main door there.”

With that, the lawyer left him. In a few moments, he had experienced, almost at the same time, almost in the same breath, the whole gamut of possible emotions. The words of that coldhearted man had pierced his heart like needles of ice or knives of fire. When he found out that nothing was finished, he breathed again; but he could not have said whether what he felt was satisfaction or pain.

He stood next to several groups of people and eavesdropped. The court list was very full, the presiding judge had indicated that two straightforward, short matters were scheduled for that same day. They had started with the infanticide and now they had moved on to the convict, the recidivist, the “homing pigeon.” This man had stolen some apples, but that did not seem to have been proved; what was proved was that he had already been in the galleys in Toulon. That is what ruined his case. The man’s examination was already over and the witness statements had been taken, too; but still to come were the speech for the defence and the closing arguments of the public prosecutor’s department; it would hardly be over before midnight. The man would most likely be found guilty; the counsel for the prosecution—a wit who made up rhymes—was good. He never missed “his” defendants.

An usher stood by the door that led to the courtroom. He asked this usher: “Monsieur, will the door be opened soon?”

“It will not be opened,” replied the usher.

“What! Won’t be opened again after the break? Isn’t the court in recess?”

“The court has just resumed,” replied the usher. “But the door will not be opened again.”

“Why not?”

“Because the room is full.”

“How’s that! Aren’t there any more seats?”

“Not a one. The door is closed. No one can get in now.”

After a pause, the usher added: “There are actually two or three seats behind Monsieur le président, but the judge only allows public servants in there.” That said, the usher turned his back to him.

He withdrew with his head down, crossed the antechamber, and slowly went back down the stairs, as though hesitating at every step. It is likely he was holding counsel with himself. The violent struggle unleashed in him since the day before was not yet over, and at every moment it took a new turn. When he reached the landing, he leaned back against the rails and folded his arms. Suddenly he fished inside his redingote, took out his pocketbook, pulled out a pencil, ripped out a page, and swiftly wrote the following line: “Monsieur Madeleine, mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer.” Then he flew back up the stairs, pushed through the crowd, went straight up to the usher, and said to him in the voice of authority: “Give this to Monsieur le président.” The usher took the sheet of paper, glanced at it, and did what he asked.

VIII. PREFERENTIAL ADMISSION

UNBEKNOWN TO HIM, the mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer enjoyed a kind of celebrity. For seven years his reputation for virtue had spread throughout Lower Boulonnais, and it had ended up jumping over the borders of a small country enclave and spreading into two or three neighbouring départements. Apart from the considerable service he had rendered to the main town by getting the jet bead industry back on its feet, there was not one of the hundred and forty-one communes in the arrondissement of Montreuil-sur-mer that did not owe some benefit to him. He had even been able to boost and assist the industries of other arrondissements to prosper, as the need arose. He had at times, accordingly, sustained with his own credit and his own funds the tulle factory in Boulogne, the mechanized flax mill in Frévent, and the hydraulic textile manufacturing of Boubers-sur-Canche. Everywhere the name of Monsieur Madeleine was uttered in veneration. Arras and Douai envied the happy little town of Montreuil-sur-mer its mayor.

The judge of the royal court of Douai, who was presiding over this session of the circuit court in Arras, like everybody else, knew this name, so thoroughly and universally honoured. When the usher discreetly opened the door between the council chamber and the courtroom, leaned down behind the judge’s chair, and handed him the piece of paper on which the line we have just read was written, he added: “This gentleman would like to sit in on the proceedings.” The judge made a sharp gesture of deference, grabbed a pen, jotted a few words at the bottom of the note, and handed it back to the usher, saying to him: “Let him in.” The unfortunate man whose story we are relating had remained by the door of the hall at the same spot and in the same position as when the usher had left him. He heard someone say in the middle of his daydream: “Would Monsieur do me the honour of following me.” It was this same usher who had turned his back on him a moment before and who now bowed and scraped so low before him he practically swept the ground. At the same time, the usher handed him the note. He unfolded it and, as he happened to be near the lamp, he was able to read: “The president of the circuit court would like to pay his respects to Monsieur Madeleine.” He screwed the note up in his hand as though those few words left him with a strange and bitter aftertaste.

He followed the usher.

A few minutes later, he found himself alone in a kind of panelled chamber that looked very spartan, lit by two candles standing on a table covered in green baize. The final words of the usher who had just left him were still buzzing in his ears: “Monsieur, you are now in the council chamber; you have only to turn the brass knob of this door and you will be in the courtroom behind the chair of Monsieur le président.” Those words mingled in his thoughts with a dim memory of the narrow corridors and black stairs he had just traversed.

The usher had left him on his own. The supreme moment had arrived. He tried to collect himself but failed. It is especially at those moments when you most need to secure them to the poignant realities of life that all the loose threads of thought snap in your brain. He stood in the very spot where judges deliberate and sentence. In a calm daze he gazed at that peaceful and fearful chamber where so many existences had been broken, where his name would soon ring out and his destiny be decided. He gazed at the wall, then he gazed at himself, marvelling that it was this particular chamber and that it was he, himself.

He hadn’t eaten for more than twenty-four hours, he was shattered by the jolting of the cariole, but he didn’t feel it; it seemed to him that he didn’t feel a thing.

He went up to a black frame hanging on the wall, which contained, behind glass, an old autographed letter of Jean-Nicolas Pache, mayor of Paris and minister, dated, no doubt by mistake, June 11, Year II;1 in it Pache was sending the Commune the list of ministers and deputies placed under house arrest. An onlooker able to see him and observe him in that instant would no doubt have imagined that the letter seemed most curious to him, for he couldn’t take his eyes off it and read it over and over again. He read it without taking it in and without knowing what he was doing. He was thinking of Fantine and Cosette.

While he was lost in thought, he turned round and his eyes fell on the brass knob of the door that separated him from the courtroom. He had almost forgotten about that door. His gaze, at first steady, stopped there, remained fixed on this brass knob; then it turned wild and staring and little by little was tinged with horror.

Beads of sweat broke out on his scalp and streamed down his temples. At a certain point, he made a gesture with a sort of defiant authority, that indescribable movement perfectly embodying the meaning: For God’s sake! Who’s forcing me to do this? Then he swung back again sharply, saw the door through which he had come, went to it, opened it and went out. He was no longer in that room, he was outside, in a corridor, a long, narrow corridor, punctuated with steps and gates, which created all kinds of nooks and crannies, lit here and there by lamps similar to night-lights for sick people; it was the corridor by which he had come. He took a deep breath, cocked his ear—not a sound behind him, not a sound in front of him; he began to run as though someone were chasing him.

When he had gone back round several of the sharp turns in the corridor, he listened again. There was still the same silence and the same gloaming all around him. He was out of breath, he was tottering, he leaned against the wall. The stone was cold, his sweat was icy on his forehead, he straightened up with a shiver.

Then and there, alone in the darkness, standing trembling with cold and perhaps something else, he thought long and hard.

He had thought long and hard the whole night, he had thought long and hard the whole day; the only thing he could still hear inside him was a voice that said: Woe is me!

A quarter of an hour went by. Finally, he hung his head, sighed in anguish, dropped his arms to his side and retraced his steps. He walked slowly as if utterly overcome. It felt as though someone had collared him as he fled and brought him back.

He went back into the council chamber. The first thing he saw was the doorknob. This doorknob, round and of polished brass, gleamed, in his eyes, like some awful star. He gazed at it the way a lamb would gaze into the eyes of a tiger. He could not take his eyes off it.

Now and then he took another step toward the door.

Had he listened, he would have heard a confused buzz, the noise of the room next door; but he didn’t listen and he didn’t hear.

All of a sudden, without knowing how, he found himself right next to the door. He seized the knob convulsively; the door opened.

He was in the courtroom.

IX. A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE ABOUT TO SHAPE UP

HE STEPPED INSIDE, closed the door behind him mechanically, and remained stock still, considering what he saw.

It was a rather vast dimly lit enclosure, now full of din, now full of silence, where the whole apparatus of a criminal trial unfolded in all its mean and mournful gravity before the multitude.

At one end of the room, where he found himself, worried-looking judges in worn-out robes were biting their nails or closing their eyes; at the other end, the rabble in rags, lawyers in every possible pose, soldiers with hard, honest faces; tarnished old wainscoting, a dirty ceiling, tables covered in serge that was rather more yellow than green, doors blackened by hands; nails planted in the panelling, small tavern-style oil lamps providing more smoke than light; on the tables, candles in brass candlesticks; gloom, ugliness, sadness; and from all this a sense of the austere and the august emanated, for you could feel that great human thing known as the law and that great divine thing known as justice in that room.

No one in the crowd paid the slightest attention to him. All eyes converged on a single point, a wooden bench backing onto a small door, along the wall to the left of the presiding judge. On this bench, which was lit by several candles, there was a man between two gendarmes.

This man was the man. He did not look for him, he saw him at once. His eyes gravitated toward him of their own accord, as though they had known in advance where he was.

He felt as if he was looking at himself, older, not of course absolutely the same in the face, but alike in attitude and general look, with that hair sticking up, with those wild anxious eyes, with that smock—himself as he was the day he walked into Digne, full of hate and hiding in his soul that hideous store of frightening thoughts he had spent nineteen years hoarding on the paving stones of jail. He said to himself with a shiver: “My God! Is this what I’d come to again?” This creature appeared to be at least sixty years old. There was something indefinably coarse, stupid, and scared about him.

At the sound of the door, people had stood aside to make room for him, the presiding judge had turned his head round, and realizing that the personage who had stepped in was Monsieur le maire of Montreuil-sur-mer, had nodded to him. The counsel for the prosecution, who had seen Monsieur Madeleine in Montreuil-sur-mer, where the duties of his office had called him more than once, also greeted him. He scarcely registered them. He was in the grip of a sort of hallucination; he stared.

Judges, a clerk, gendarmes, a sea of heads viciously curious—he had seen all that already, once, twenty-seven years ago. These deadly things had caught up with him once more; there they were, in front of him; they stirred once more, they existed. It was no longer an effort of memory, a mirage of his mind; those were real gendarmes and real judges, a real horde and real flesh-and-blood men. It had happened, it was all over; he saw all the monstrous aspects of his past come to life again, reappearing all around him, with all the frightening force of reality.

This was all gaping before him. He was horrified by it, he closed his eyes, and cried out from the bottom of his soul: Never!

And by a tragic twist of fate that caused all his notions to totter and almost caused him to lose his mind, it was another self who was there! This man they were trying—they all called him Jean Valjean!

He had before his eyes an unheard-of vision, a sort of reenactment of the most horrible moment of his life, played by his ghost.

It was all there, it was the same apparatus, the same time of night, almost the same faces on the judges, soldiers, and members of the audience. Only, above the president’s head there was a crucifix, something that was missing from the courtrooms at the time he was convicted.1 When he was tried, God had not been there.

There was a chair behind him; he dropped into it, terrified at the idea that he could be seen. When he was seated, he took advantage of a pile of files sitting on the judge’s desk to hide his face from the whole room. He could now see without being seen. Little by little he recovered. He fully entered into a sense of reality; he attained that state of calmness that allows you to listen.

Monsieur Bamatabois was one of the jurors.

He looked for Javert, but couldn’t see him. The witness bench was hidden from him by the clerk’s table. Then again, as we’ve said, the room was barely lit.

When he entered, the defence counsel was winding up his speech for the defence. Everyone’s attention was roused to its highest pitch; the matter had been going on for three hours. For three hours, this crowd had watched as a man, an unknown man, some kind of miserable specimen, either profoundly stupid or profoundly clever, gradually buckled under the weight of a terrible probability. This man, as we already know, was a tramp who had been found in a field, carrying a branch laden with ripe apples, torn off an apple tree in a neighbouring enclosure known as Pierron Close. Who was this man? An investigation had been conducted, witnesses had just been heard, they had been unanimous; sure knowledge had shone forth out of the whole sorry deliberations. The prosecution was saying: “We are not only holding a fruit thief, a poacher; we are holding here, in our hands, a crook, a backslider at odds with the world who has broken parole, an ex-convict, a villain of the most dangerous kind, a criminal called Jean Valjean, wanted by the law for a long time and who, eight years ago, when he came out of jail in Toulon, committed highway robbery under force of arms against the person of a young boy from Savoy called Petit-Gervais, a crime under article 383 of the criminal code, for which we reserve the right to pursue him further, when his identity is legally established. He has just committed a fresh theft. This is a case of recidivism. Convict him for the new crime; he will be tried for the old crime later.” Faced with such an accusation, faced with the unanimity of the witnesses, the accused seemed above all amazed. He made gestures and signs that meant no! or else he examined the ceiling. He scarcely spoke, gave awkward answers, but from head to toe, his entire person screamed that he was not guilty as charged. He was like the village idiot in the presence of all these fine minds ranged in battle around him—or like a foreigner in the midst of this society that had him by the throat. Yet it meant the most menacing future for him; the probability of his conviction was growing every minute, and the whole crowd was looking, more anxiously than he was, at the disastrous sentence that was hanging over him more and more ominously. One possibility opened up the prospect, beyond jail, of the death penalty, if his identity was established and if the Petit-Gervais matter were to end up resulting in a conviction. What was this man? What was the nature of his apathy? Was it imbecility or a ruse? Did he understand only too well or did he not understand at all? Questions that divided the crowd and seemed to split the jury. There was something frightening and something intriguing in this trial; the drama was not only sinister, it was obscure.

The defence counsel had given a pretty good summing up in that provincial lingo that had long constituted the eloquence of the bar and that lawyers used to use in days gone by, every bit as much in Romorantin as in Paris or Montbrison, which today, having become classic and therefore old hat, is scarcely spoken anymore other than by the official orators at the bar, for whom it is most useful in its grave sonority and its majestic tone; a language in which a husband or a wife is called a spouse, Paris, the centre of the arts and of civilization, the king, the monarch, my lord bishop, the holy pontiff, the counsel for the prosecution, the eloquent interpreter for the prosecution, the speech for the defence, the strains we have just heard, the century of Louis XIV, the grand siècle, a theatre, a temple of Melpomene,2 the reigning royal family, the august blood of our kings, a concert, a solemn celebration of music, the general in command, the illustrious warrior who, etc., theology students, those gentle Levites,3 mistakes imputed to newspapers, the imposture that distills its venom in the columns of these organs, etc., etc. The lawyer had accordingly begun by expatiating on the theft of the apples—something difficult enough to do in the grandiloquent manner, but Bénigne Bossuet4 himself was once forced to refer to a hen in the middle of a funeral oration and he carried it off with alacrity. The defence attorney had established that the theft of the apples had not been materially proved.

His client, whom, in his role as defence counsel, he insisted on calling Champmathieu, had not been seen by anyone scaling the wall or breaking off the branch. He had been arrested in possession of said branch (which the lawyer happily dubbed a bough); but he claimed to have found it on the ground and to have picked it up. Where was the proof to the contrary? Undoubtedly the branch had been broken off and concealed after he had scaled the wall and then thrown away by the alarmed poacher; undoubtedly there had been a thief. But what proved that this thief was Champmathieu? A single thing—his status as an ex-convict. The attorney did not deny that this status appeared, unfortunately, to be clearly proved: The accused had resided in Faverolles; the accused had been a pruner there; the name Champmathieu could well have started out as Jean Mathieu; all that was true; finally, four witnesses recognized Champmathieu positively and without hesitation as being the galley slave Jean Valjean. To these points and to this testimony the attorney could only oppose his client’s denial, a self-interested denial; but supposing he were the convict Jean Valjean—did that prove that he was the stealer of the apples? That was an assumption, at most; not proof. The defendant, it was true—and the defence counsel had to agree “in good faith”—had adopted “a bad defence strategy.” He persisted in denying everything, both the theft and his status as an ex-convict. Admission on this last point would certainly have been better, and would have earned him the judges’ indulgence; the defence counsel had advised him to take this course, but the accused had obstinately persisted in refusing to do so, no doubt thinking he’d save the whole situation by not admitting anything. It was a mistake; but was it not necessary to consider the limited nature of the man’s intelligence? The man was obviously a cretin. A horrible long stretch in jail and a miserable long stretch out of jail had brutalized him, etc., etc. He defended himself badly, but was that a reason to convict him? As for the Petit-Gervais matter, it was not the job of the defence counsel to discuss it, it was not under consideration. The attorney summed up by beseeching the jury and the court, if the identity of Jean Valjean seemed evident to them, to apply police penalties to him that addressed the issue of breaking parole and not the appalling punishment that smites the repeat offender.

The counsel for the prosecution responded to the defence counsel. He was bad-tempered and floridly red-faced, like most prosecutors.

He congratulated the defence counsel on his “loyalty” and cleverly took advantage of this loyalty. He attacked the accused using all the points the defence had conceded. The defence seemed to agree that the accused was Jean Valjean. He noted this. The man was therefore Jean Valjean. This fact was now an established fact for the prosecution and could no longer be contested. Here, through a cunning bit of antonomasia,5 going back to the sources and the causes of criminal behavior, the counsel for the prosecution thundered against the immorality of the Romantic school,6 then dawning under the name Satanic school, which had been bestowed upon it by the critics of the Oriflamme and the Quotidienne;7 not without credibility, he attributed to the influence of this perverse literature the crime of Champmathieu, or rather Jean Valjean. These considerations exhausted, he moved on to Jean Valjean himself. What was Jean Valjean? Description of Jean Valjean. A monster spewed out, etc. The model for these sorts of descriptions is provided by the tale of Théramènes,8 which is not much use for tragedy but serves legal eloquence brilliantly every day. Audience and jury quaked. The description over with, the counsel for the prosecution launched into an oratorical movement intended to excite the greatest possible enthusiasm on the part of the Journal de la Préfecture the following morning: “And it is a man like this, etc., etc., a vagrant, a beggar, with no means of support, etc., etc.; accustomed by his past life to culpable actions and barely checked by his time in jail, as the crime committed against Petit-Gervais proves, etc., etc.; it is a man like this who, caught on the public highway in the very act of theft, a few feet from a wall he’d scaled, still holding in his hand the object he’d stolen, denies being caught in the act, denies the theft, the scaling of the wall, denies everything, denies even his name, denies even his identity! Apart from a hundred other proofs we need not go back over, four witnesses recognize him, Javert, upstanding inspector of police, Javert, as well as three of his old companions in ignominy, the convicts Brevet, Chenildieu, and Cochepaille. What does he offer against this devastating unanimity? Denial. Talk about hard! You will take the law into your hands, gentlemen of the jury, etc., etc.” While the counsel for the prosecution spoke, the accused listened, his mouth hanging open, in a sort of amazement that was coloured with a little admiration. He was obviously surprised that a man could talk like that. From time to time, at the most energetic moments of the prosecutor’s speech, in those instants when eloquence cannot contain itself and spills over in a flow of withering epithets, enveloping the accused like a storm, he slowly shook his head from right to left and from left to right, a sad and mute sort of protest that he’d contented himself with since the beginning of the debates. Two or three times the spectators closest to him heard him say under his breath: “This is where it’s got us, not asking Monsieur Baloup!” The counsel for the prosecution remarked to the jury on this stunned, obviously calculated attitude which denoted, not imbecility but skill, ruse, the habit of misleading the law, and that showed “the profound perversity” of the man in its true light. He ended by expressing reservations about the Petit-Gervais affair and by calling for a severe sentence.

That was, as you will recall, hard labour in perpetuity.

The defence counsel rose, began by complimenting “Monsieur, the counsel for the prosecution” on his “admirable speech,” then responded as best he could, but he tailed off feebly; the ground was evidently giving way beneath him.

X. THE STRATEGY OF DENIAL

THE MOMENT FOR closing the proceedings had come. The presiding judge asked the accused to stand and put the usual question to him: “Have you anything to add to your defence?” The man stood twirling a grubby cap in his hands and didn’t seem to have heard. The judge repeated the question.

This time the man heard. He seemed to understand, he gave a start as though he’d just woken up, cast his eye all around him, looked at the public, the gendarmes, his lawyer, the jury, the court, placed his monstrous fist on the rim of the bar standing in front of his seat, gave everything the once-over again and suddenly, fixing his gaze on the counsel for the prosecution, broke into speech. It was like an eruption. The words seemed to escape from his mouth, incoherent, impetuous, jumbled, as though they were all rushing to get out at once. He said: “I’ve got this to say. I used to be a wheelwright in Paris—and that was with Monsieur Baloup, too. It’s a hard slog. If you’re a wheelwright, you have to work outdoors all the time, in yards, under open sheds if you’ve got good masters, never in closed workshops, because you’ve got to have room, you see. In winter, you get so cold you have to flap your arms to keep warm; but the masters don’t like that, they reckon that wastes time. Handling iron when there’s ice on the pavement—that’s tough. It wears a man out pretty quick. You’re old before your time in this line of work. At forty, a man’s finished. Me, I was fifty-three, I was really pushing it. And then, workers are a nasty lot! When a poor bugger’s no longer young, they call you an old nitwit, an old noodle! I wasn’t making more than thirty sous a day, they paid me as little as they could, the masters took advantage of my age. On top of that, I had my daughter, who was a washerwoman down by the river. She made a bit to put in. That way, with the two of us, we got by. She had it hard, too. All the livelong day in a tub up to your waist, come rain, come snow, with the wind whipping your face; even if it’s freezing, doesn’t matter, you got to get the washing done. There are some who don’t have a lot of linen, so they’re waiting on it; if you don’t get their washing done, you lose the business. The planks aren’t joined right and water drips on you from all sides. You get your skirts all wet, top and bottom. You get soaked to the bone. She also worked in the laundry at the Enfants-Rouges,1 where the water comes through taps. You’re not in a tub. You do your washing in front of you at the tap and you do your rinsing behind you in a trough. Because it’s indoors, your body doesn’t get so cold. But there’s the steam from the hot water and it’s something shocking and it ruins your eyes. She’d get home at seven at night and she’d get to bed quick she’d be so beat. Her husband hit her. She died. We weren’t very happy. She was a good sort who never went to dances,2 who kept herself to herself. I remember one Shrove Tuesday3 when she went to bed at eight o’clock. That’s it. I’m not kidding. You’ve only got to ask. Oh, ask, fat chance! What an idiot I am! Paris is a bottomless pit. Who knows father Champmathieu there? But, like I was saying, there’s Monsieur Baloup. Go and see Monsieur Baloup. I don’t know what else you want me to say.” The man stopped speaking but stayed on his feet. He had said what he had to say in a voice that was loud, fast, raucous, hard, and hoarse, with a sort of irritated and savage naïveté. At one point he broke off to greet someone in the crowd. The sorts of affirmations he seemed to be casting to the winds before him came to him like hiccups, and he added to each of them the gesture of a woodcutter splitting wood. When he had finished, the audience burst out laughing. He looked at the public, saw that they were laughing, and though he didn’t understand, started to laugh himself.

That was ominous.

The presiding judge, an attentive and benevolent man, spoke out.

He reminded the “gentlemen of the jury” that old Monsieur Baloup, the former master wheelwright the accused claimed to have worked for, had been summonsed to no avail. He had gone bankrupt and was nowhere to be found. Then he turned to the accused and advised him to listen to what he was about to say, adding: “You are in a situation where you must think carefully. The most serious assumptions weigh against you and may have critical consequences. As the accused and in your own interest, I must ask you again to explain yourself clearly one last time on two counts: First, did you, yes or no, climb over the wall of Pierron Close, break off the branch, and steal the apples, that is to say, commit the crime of theft, aggravated by illegal entry? Second, yes or no, are you the freed convict Jean Valjean?” The accused shook his head with a competent look, like a man who has understood and knows what he is going to say in reply. He opened his mouth, turned to the judge and said: “First off …” Then he looked at his cap, he looked at the ceiling, and was silent.

“Would the accused,” the counsel for the prosecution went on in a stony voice, “please be very careful. You have not answered the questions put to you. Your distress condemns you. It is obvious that your name is not Champmathieu, that you are the convict Jean Valjean, first disguised under the name Jean Mathieu, which was his mother’s name, that you have been in the Auvergne, that you were born in Faverolles, where you were a pruner. It is obvious that you stole ripe apples from Pierron Close after illegal entry. The gentlemen of the jury will take this into account.” The accused had ended up sitting back down; he shot to his feet again when the counsel for the prosecution was finished and cried out: “You’re a nasty piece of work, you are! That’s what I wanted to say. It wouldn’t come to me at first. I didn’t steal anything. I’m a man who doesn’t eat every day. I was coming from out Ailly way, I was walking through the countryside after a shower that made the land all yellow, even the ponds were overflowing and all that was sticking up out of the sand was little grass shoots along the roadway, I found a broken branch lying on the ground with apples on it, I picked the branch up without knowing the trouble that would get me into. I’ve been in prison for three months now and I’ve been knocked around. More than that, I can’t say. They say things against me, they tell me: Answer! The gendarme, who’s a good lad, he nudges my elbow and whispers to me: Go on, answer. I don’t know how to explain; me, I didn’t have any schooling, I’m a poor man. That’s where you go wrong, not seeing that. I didn’t steal, I picked up what was lying on the ground. You talk about Jean Valjean, Jean Mathieu! I don’t know those people. They must be village people. I worked for Monsieur Baloup, boulevard de l’Hôpital. My name’s Champmathieu. You must be pretty clever to tell me where I was born. Me, I have no idea. Not everybody has a house to come into the world in. That’d be too easy. I think my father and my mother were people who worked the roads. But I don’t know. When I was a kid they called me Little, now they call me Old. That’s my Christian names for you. Take that however you like. I have been to the Auvergne, I have been to Faverolles, sure! So what? Can’t a man go to the Auvergne or to Faverolles without having been in the clink? I tell you I never stole and that I am old man Champmathieu. I was with Monsieur Baloup, he put me up in his house. You’re really starting to get my goat with all this bull, you know! Why’s everybody after me, trying to bring me down!” The counsel for the prosecution had remained standing; he addressed the presiding judge: “Monsieur le président, in the presence of the confused but extremely cunning denials of the accused, who is clearly trying to pass himself off as an idiot, but who will not succeed—we warn him—we request that it please you and that it please the court to once again call to the bar the convicts Brevet, Cochepaille, and Chenildieu, and police inspector Javert, and to interrogate them one last time about the identity of the accused as the convict Jean Valjean.” “I must remind Monsieur, the counsel for the prosecution,” said the presiding judge, “that police inspector Javert was called by his duties to the administrative centre of a neighbouring district, and left the court and left the town itself the moment his testimony was given. We gave him permission to do so, with the consent of Monsieur, the counsel for the prosecution, and the accused’s defence counsel.” “That’s right, Monsieur le président,” the counsel for the prosecution chimed in. “In the absence of Inspector Javert, I believe I should remind the gentlemen of the jury what he said in this very place a few hours ago. Javert is an esteemed police officer who, through his strict and rigorous probity, does honour to his subordinate but important duties. This is his statement: “I do not even need moral assumptions and material proofs to refute the denials of the accused. I recognize him perfectly. This man’s name is not Champmathieu; he is a former convict named Jean Valjean, who is very dangerous and very much feared. It was only with the utmost regret that he was released after serving his sentence. He did nineteen years’ hard labour for aggravated theft. He tried to escape five or six times. Apart from the Petit-Gervais and Pierron robberies, I suspect him of having further committed theft at the home of His Grace, the late bishop of Digne. I often saw him in the days when I was assistant warden at Toulon jail. I repeat that I recognize him perfectly.” This very precise statement appeared to produce a rousing impression on the public and the jury. The counsel for the prosecution wound up by insisting that in the absence of Javert, the three witnesses Brevet, Chenildieu, and Cochepaille be heard again and solemnly cross-examined.

The presiding judge gave an order to an usher, and a moment later the door of the witness chamber opened. The usher, accompanied by a gendarme ready to come to his aid, escorted the convict Brevet into the courtroom. The audience was breathless with suspense and all hearts beat as one.

The former convict Brevet was wearing the black and grey jacket of the state penitentiaries. Brevet was a character sixty years old or so who had the face of a businessman and the look of a shyster. They sometimes go together. In prison, where fresh misdemeanors had led him once more, he had become some sort of gatekeeper. He was a man of whom his superiors said: He is trying to make himself useful. The chaplains spoke highly of his religious habits. You must not forget, this happened under the Restoration.

“Brevet,” said the president, “you were sentenced for a heinous crime and you cannot take the oath …”

Brevet lowered his gaze.

“However,” the president went on, “even in the man the law has degraded, there may remain, when divine pity allows, a feeling of honour and fairness. It is to this feeling that I appeal at such a decisive moment. If such a feeling still exists in you, and I hope it does, reflect before you answer me, consider, on the one hand, this man whom a word from you may destroy, and on the other hand, justice, which a word from you may clarify. The moment is a solemn one and there is still time for you to retract, if you think you have made a mistake. Would the accused please stand? Brevet, look carefully at the accused, gather your recollections and tell us, on your soul and conscience, if you still recognize this man as your former prison mate Jean Valjean.” Brevet looked at the accused, then turned to the court.

“Yes, your honour. I was the first to recognize him and I still do. This man is Jean Valjean. Entered Toulon in 1796 and came out in 1815. I came out the year after. He looks like a real brute now, that’d be age that’s done that to him; in jail he was sly. I’m positive I recognize him.” “Go and sit down,” said the president. “The accused will remain standing.”

Chenildieu was brought in, a convict for life, as his red jersey and green cap indicated. He was serving his sentence at Toulon jail and had been removed from there for this matter. He was a small man of fifty or so, lively, weathered, puny, yellow, cheeky, frantic, whose limbs and whose whole person exhibited a sort of sickly feebleness and whose eyes expressed immense strength. His prison mates had nicknamed him Je-nie-Dieu—I deny God.

The president addressed almost identical words to him as to Brevet. The minute he reminded him that his infamy deprived him of the right to take the oath, Chenildieu raised his head and looked straight at the audience. The president invited him to gather his thoughts and asked him, as he had asked Brevet, if he still recognized the accused.

Chenildieu burst out laughing.

“By God! Recognize him! We were attached to the same chain for six years. Aren’t you talking to me anymore, old fella?”

“You may sit down,” said the judge.

The usher wheeled in Cochepaille. This other “lifer,” who had come straight from jail and who was dressed in red like Chenildieu, was a peasant from Lourdes, half man, half Pyrenees bear. He had guarded flocks in the mountains and had gone downhill from shepherd to thief. Cochepaille was no less savage and seemed even stupider than the accused. He was one of those luckless men that nature churns out as wild animals to start with and that society turns into galley slaves in the end.

The president tried to prod him with a few pathetic and solemn words and asked him, as with the other two, whether he still, without hesitation and without any trouble, recognized the man standing before him.

“It’s Jean Valjean,” said Cochepaille. “We even called him Jean-the-Jack, he was so strong.”

Each of the affirmations of these three men, obviously sincere and made in good faith, had stirred up a murmur that boded ill for the accused, a murmur that grew and lasted longer each time a new declaration was added to the preceding one. The accused, for his part, listened to them with the stunned look that, according to the prosecution, was his principal defence. At the first, the gendarmes next to him heard him mutter between clenched teeth: “Well! I’ll be buggered!” After the second, he said a bit louder, with an almost gratified air: “Terrific!” At the third, he shouted: “Marvellous!” The president addressed him: “The accused has heard the testimony. What do you have to say?”

He answered: “I say, Marvellous!”

A rumble broke out in the crowd and almost reached the jury. It was obvious the man was finished.

“Ushers,” said the president, “call the room to order. I am about to close the case.”

At that moment, a movement was made right next to the judge. A voice was heard, crying out: “Brevet, Chenildieu, Cochepaille! Look over here.” All who heard this voice froze, it was so harrowing and so terrible. All eyes turned to the spot from whence it had come. A man, placed among the privileged spectators sitting behind the judge and jury, had just stood up, had pushed the door at elbow height that separated the bench from the well of the courtroom, and was now standing in the middle of the room. The judge, the counsel for the prosecution, Monsieur Bamatabois, twenty people recognized him and cried out in unison: “Monsieur Madeleine!” XI. CHAMPMATHIEU MORE AND MORE AMAZED

IT WAS, INDEED, him. The clerk’s lamp lit up his face. He was holding his hat in his hand, there was nothing out of place in his attire, his redingote was carefully buttoned up. He was pale and shaking slightly. His hair, still grey when he arrived in Arras, was not yet completely white when he first stepped into the courtroom. It had gone white in the hour he had been there.

All heads looked up. The sensation was indescribable. There was a moment of hesitation in the auditorium. The voice had been so poignant, the man standing there looked so calm, that at first nobody could work out what was going on. Everybody wondered who had cried out. Nobody could believe that it was this serene-looking man who had let out that hair-raising cry.

The confusion lasted only a few seconds. Before the presiding judge and the counsel for the prosecution could say a word, before the gendarmes and the ushers could make a move, the man everyone still called Monsieur Madeleine at the time had advanced toward the witnesses Cochepaille, Brevet, and Chenildieu.

“Don’t you recognize me?” he said.

All three sat stunned and signalled by a shake of the head that they did not know him. Cochepaille was intimidated and gave a military salute. Monsieur Madeleine turned toward the jurors and toward the court and said in a soft voice: “Gentlemen of the jury, let the accused go. Monsieur le président, arrest me. The man you are looking for is not this man, it is me. I am Jean Valjean.” No one breathed. The initial commotion caused by amazement gave way to a sepulchral silence. You could feel in the room that kind of religious terror that takes hold of the crowd when something great is being enacted.

But the judge’s face was stamped with sympathy and sadness; he had exchanged a quick sign with the counsel for the prosecution and a few words under his breath with the counsel assessors. He addressed the public and asked in a tone that was understood by all: “Is there a doctor in the house?” The counsel for the prosecution took the floor: “Gentlemen of the jury, this very strange and unexpected incident that has disturbed this hearing inspires in us, as in you, only a feeling we have no need to express. You all know, at least by reputation, the honourable Monsieur Madeleine, mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer. If there is a doctor in the audience, we join Monsieur le président in begging him to please come to Monsieur Madeleine’s assistance and to take him home.” Monsieur Madeleine did not let the counsel for the prosecution finish. He interrupted him in a tone full of indulgence and authority. Here are the words he spoke; we record them verbatim, such as they were immediately written down after the hearing by one of those who witnessed this scene, such as they are still ringing in the ears of those who heard them, now nearly forty years ago.

“Thank you, Monsieur, the counsel for the prosecution, but I am not mad. You will see. You were on the point of committing a grave mistake; let this man go. I am performing a duty, I am the sorry convict. I am the only one who can see clearly here and I am telling you the truth. What I am doing at this moment, God, who is on high, looks down upon, and that is enough. You can take me, for here I am. And yet, I did my best. I hid under another name, I became rich, I became mayor; I wanted to fit in with honest people. It seems that this is not to be. To be brief, there are a lot of things I can’t tell you, I am not going to tell you the story of my life, one day you’ll know. I did rob Monseigneur the bishop, it’s true; I did rob Petit-Gervais, it’s true. They were right when they told you Jean Valjean was a mean wretch of a man. He is not perhaps entirely to blame. Listen, your honours, a man as humbled as I am has no business remonstrating with Providence or giving society advice; but, you see, the infamy I tried to put behind me is a damaging thing. The galleys make the galley slave. Think about that, if you will. Before jail, I was a poor peasant, not too bright, a sort of dimwit; jail changed me. I was stupid, I became mean; I was a great lump, I became a firebrand. Later, goodness and compassion saved me, just as severity had once sunk me. Sorry, forgive me, you can’t understand what I’m saying here. You will find at my place, in the ashes in the fireplace, the forty-sou coin I stole seven years ago from Petit-Gervais. I have nothing further to say. Take me. My God! Monsieur, the counsel for the prosecution, is shaking his head, you say, Monsieur Madeleine has lost his mind, you don’t believe me! I tell you, that is appalling. Do not condemn this man, at least! How’s that! These men don’t recognize me! I wish Javert were here. He’d recognize me, that’s for sure!” Nothing could convey the sombre and melancholy tone in which these words were spoken.

He turned to the three convicts: “Well, I recognize you, I certainly do! Brevet! Do you remember—”

He broke off, hesitated for a moment, and then said: “Do you remember those checked wool braces you used to have in jail?”

Brevet gave a start of surprise and studied him from head to toe with a frightened look. He continued: “Chenildieu, you gave yourself the nickname of Je-nie-Dieu, you have a terrible burn over the whole of your right shoulder from lying down one day with your shoulder on a chafing dish full of smoldering embers to erase the three letters T.F.P.,1 which can still be seen even so. Answer me, is that true?” “It is true,” said Chenildieu.

He addressed Cochepaille: “Cochepaille, close to the crook of your left arm you have a date carved in blue letters with burnt powder. This date is the day the emperor landed in Cannes, March 1, 1815. Roll up your sleeve.” Cochepaille rolled up his sleeve, as all eyes around him were riveted to his bare arm. A gendarme brought a lamp closer; the date was there.

The poor man turned toward the audience and toward the judges with a smile that still, to this day, breaks the hearts of those who saw it when they think of it. It was a smile of triumph and it was also a smile of despair.

“So you see,” he said, “I am Jean Valjean.”

There were no longer in the ring either judges or accusers or gendarmes; there were only staring eyes and hearts that were deeply moved. No one any longer remembered the role that each one might be assigned to play; the counsel for the prosecution forgot he was there to prosecute, the presiding judge that he was there to preside, the defence counsel that he was there to defend. The striking thing is that no question was asked, no authority intervened. The peculiarity of sublime spectacles is to seize all souls and make all witnesses spectators. Perhaps none of them realized what he was experiencing; no doubt none of them told himself he was seeing a great light shining there in all its splendour; but all felt inwardly dazzled.

It was obvious that they had Jean Valjean before their very eyes. That shone out clear as the light of day. This man’s emergence had been enough to completely illuminate an episode so completely obscure just a moment before. Without there being any need for any further explanation now, the entire crowd, as by a sort of electric revelation, understood at once and at a single glance the simple and magnificent story of a man giving himself up so that another man was not condemned in his place. The details, the hesitations, the possible niggling reluctance, were lost in this vast luminous fact.

The impression swiftly passed, but for the moment it was irresistible.

“I don’t want to disturb the proceedings any further,” Jean Valjean went on. “I’ll be off, since no one wants to arrest me. I have several things to do. Monsieur, the counsel for the prosecution, knows who I am, he knows where I am going, he will have me arrested when he is ready.” He headed for the exit door. Not a voice rose, not an arm shot out to stop him. Everyone moved aside. He had something divine about him at that moment, a quality that forces the multitudes to draw back and make way before a man. He moved through the crowd slowly. No one ever knew who opened the door, but it is certain that the door was found open when he reached it. Having got that far, he turned round and said: “Monsieur, the counsel for the prosecution, I remain at your disposal.” Then he addressed the audience: “All of you, all who are here, you find me worthy of pity, don’t you? My God! When I think what I was on the point of doing, I find myself worthy of envy. Yet I’d have preferred none of this happened.” He went out and the door shut as it had opened, for those who do certain supremely good and mighty things are always sure of being served by someone in the crowd.

Less than an hour later, the jury’s verdict unburdened the man named Champmathieu from all accusation; and Champmathieu, immediately set free, walked away stunned, believing all men mad and not understanding a thing about the vision he’d beheld.