بخش 2 کتاب 2

BOOK TWO

THE SHIP ORION

NUMBER 246011 BECOMES NUMBER 9430

JEAN VALJEAN WAS NABBED again.

You will be grateful to us for passing rapidly over these painful details. We will restrict ourselves to transcribing two short pieces published in the newspapers of the day, a few months after the surprising events that occurred in Montreuil-sur-mer.

These articles are a little perfunctory. You will recall that there was no Gazette des Tribunaux yet at the time.

We have taken the first from the Drapeau blanc.2 It is dated July 25, 1823:

An arrondissement of the Pas-de-Calais has just seen an event out of the ordinary. Some years back, a stranger to that département, a man named Monsieur Madeleine, had revived an old local industry, the manufacture of jet and black glass beads, thanks to new processes. He made his fortune doing so and, we must say, that of the district. In recognition of his services, he was appointed mayor. The police have discovered that this Monsieur Madeleine was none other than an ex-convict in breach of ban, sentenced in 1796 for robbery, and named Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean has been sent back to jail. It seems that prior to his arrest he had managed to withdraw from Monsieur Laffitte’s bank a sum of more than half a million which he had invested there and which he had earned, furthermore, perfectly legitimately, they say, through his business. It is not known where Jean Valjean has hidden this sum since his return to Toulon jail.

The second article, a bit more detailed, is taken from the Journal de Paris, same date.

A freed ex-convict named Jean Valjean has just appeared before the circuit court of the Var in circumstances made to attract attention. This rogue had managed to outwit the vigilance of the police; he had changed his name and succeeded in getting himself appointed as mayor of one of our little northern towns. He had set up in that town a fairly considerable business. He was at last unmasked and arrested, thanks to the indefatigable zeal of the public prosecutor’s department. He had as concubine a streetwalker who died of shock at the moment of his arrest. This miserable wretch, who is endowed with herculean strength, found the means to escape; but, three or four days after said escape, the police once more got their hands on him, in Paris itself, just as he was climbing up into one of those little cabs that ply between the capital and the village of Montfermeil (Seine-et-Oise). They say he took advantage of the interval of those three or four days of freedom to withdraw a considerable sum placed by him with one of our leading bankers. This sum is estimated at six or seven hundred thousand francs. According to the bill of indictment, he has buried it in a place known only to himself and it has not been possible to seize it. Whatever the case may be, the said Jean Valjean has just been brought before the circuit court of the département of the Var charged with committing highway robbery under arms, about eight years ago, on the person of one of those honest children who, as the patriarch of Ferney3 has written in immortal verse, … Arrive every year from Savoy,

Their hands lightly wiping

Long chimneys thick with soot.

This bandit renounced any self-defence. It has been proved, through the able and eloquent mouthpiece of the public prosecutor’s office, that the robbery was committed in collaboration and that Jean Valjean was part of a gang of thieves in the Midi. Consequently, Jean Valjean, being found guilty, has been given the death sentence. This criminal refused to take his case to the final court of appeal. The king, in his inexhaustible clemency, has deigned to commute his sentence to that of hard labour in perpetuity. Jean Valjean was immediately sent to Toulon jail.

It was not forgotten that Jean Valjean had religious habits at Montreuil-sur-mer. A few newspapers, among others the Constitutionnel,4 presented this commutation as a triumph for the clerical party.

Jean Valjean changed numbers in jail. He became known as 9430.

For the rest, we might as well get it off our chests now once and for all that, along with Monsieur Madeleine, the prosperity of Montreuil-sur-mer disappeared; all he had foreseen during his long dark night of the soul came to pass; with him gone, the soul was gone, in fact. After his fall, what happened at Montreuil-sur-mer was the usual self-interested divvying up of what is left when great men fall, that fatal carving up of flourishing enterprises that takes place, out of sight, daily, in the human community and that history has noted only once because it happened to occur after the death of Alexander the Great. Lieutenants have themselves crowned kings; foremen play at being manufacturers. Envious rivalries rear their ugly heads. The vast workshops of Monsieur Madeleine were shut down; the buildings fell into ruin, the workers scattered. Some left the area, others left the trade. From that day forth, everything was done on a small scale instead of on a large scale—for the lucre, instead of for the common good. No more centre, everywhere competition and ruthlessness. Monsieur Madeleine used to dominate everything and provide direction. With him fallen, it was every man for himself; the fighting spirit took over from the spirit of organization, harshness from cordiality, the hate of each against all from the benevolence of the founder of all; the bonds knitted by Monsieur Madeleine became tangled and broke; processes were rigged, products debased, confidence killed off; markets diminished, fewer orders were placed; wages dropped, workshops stopped work, bankruptcy ensued. After that, nothing left for the poor. Everything fell apart.

Even the state realized that someone had been crushed somewhere. Less than four years after the circuit court decree establishing, for the benefit of the galleys, that Monsieur Madeleine and Jean Valjean were one and the same, taxes were doubled in the district of Montreuil-sur-mer, and Monsieur de Villèle addressed the House to that effect in the month of February 1827.

IN WHICH YOU WILL READ TWO LINES OF VERSE THAT ARE PERHAPS THE DEVIL’S

BEFORE WE GO any further, it would be appropriate to recount in some detail a weird incident that happened at Montfermeil around the same time and that may not be purely coincidental to certain conjectures of the public prosecutor’s department.

There is in the region of Montfermeil a very ancient superstition, all the more curious and all the more precious since a popular superstition in the Paris environs is like an aloe vera plant in Siberia. We are among those who respect anything that smacks of the rare plant. So here is the Montfermeil superstition. The locals believe that the devil has, from time immemorial, chosen the forest to hide his treasures in. The good women there claim that it is not rare, at the end of day, in remote places in the woods, to meet a black man with the look of a carter or a woodcutter, shod in clogs, decked out in breeches and a frock of coarse canvas cloth, who is recognizable in that, instead of a cap or hat, he has two immense horns on his head. This would, indeed, make him fairly recognizable. This man is usually busy digging a hole. There are three ways of dealing with coming across him. The first is to approach the man and speak to him. Then you realize the man is nothing more than a peasant, that he looks black because it is dusk, that he is not digging a hole at all but cutting the grass for his cows, and that what you took for horns is nothing more than a manure fork he carries on his back, whose prongs only seemed to sprout out of his head because of the perspective offered by the fading light. You go back home and you die before the week is out. The second approach is to observe him, wait till he has dug his hole, till he has covered it over and gone on his way; then to run quickly to the ditch, open it up again and take out the “treasure” that the black man has obviously put there. In this case, you die before the month is out. Lastly, the third approach is to not speak to the black man, to not even look at him, and to take off as fast as your legs will carry you. You die before the year is out.

As all three methods have their drawbacks, the second, which offers at least some advantages, among others that of owning a treasure, if only for a month, is the one generally adopted. Hardy types, who can’t resist a gamble, have thereby often enough, we are assured, opened up the holes dug by the black man and tried to rob the devil. It seems the operation is fairly hopeless. At least, if we are to believe the tradition and, in particular, the two enigmatic lines in barbaric Latin that a bad Norman monk named Tryphon,1 who was a bit of a wizard, has left us on the subject. This Tryphon is buried in the abbey of Saint-Georges de Bocherville near Rouen, and toads breed on his grave.

So, you go to enormous trouble, for these particular holes are normally very deep, you sweat, you root around, you toil away all night, for this is done at night, your shirt gets soaked, your candle burns out, you damage your pickaxe, and when at last you get to the bottom of the hole, when you lay your hand on the “treasure,” what do you find? What is the devil’s treasure? A sou, sometimes an écu, a stone, a skeleton, a bloody corpse, sometimes a ghost folded in four like a sheet of paper in a wallet, sometimes nothing. This is what Tryphon’s couplet seems to announce to the indiscreetly curious: Dig, and in the hole find dark treasure buried,

Paltry coins, stones, corpses, ghosts, worthless things.2

It seems that these days you also find there either a powder horn with bullets or an old pack of greasy scorched cards that has obviously been used by devils. Tryphon does not record the two last findings, given that Tryphon lived in the twelfth century, and it does not appear that the devil had the wit to invent gunpowder before Roger Bacon3 or cards before Charles VI.4 For the rest, if you play with these cards, you are sure to lose everything you own; and as for the powder in the powder horn, it has the property of making your gun go off in your face.

Well, very shortly after the period when the public prosecutor’s department decided the freed convict Jean Valjean had been prowling around Montfermeil during the few days he was on the run, it was remarked in this same village that a certain old road-mender named Boulatruelle was “taken with” the woods. People in the area claimed to know that this Boulatruelle had been in jail; he was subject to occasional police surveillance and, as he could not find work anywhere, the local council employed him at a pittance as a road-mender on the crossroad from Gagny to Lagny.

This Boulatruelle was looked down on by the people of the district—too respectful, too humble, too quick to doff his cap at everyone, quivering and smiling in front of the gendarmes, probably affiliated with gangs of bandits, people said, suspected of ambushes at the edge of copses at nightfall. The only thing going for him was that he was a drunk.

This is what people thought they had noted:

For some little time, Boulatruelle had been leaving his job of stone-lining and road maintenance extremely early and going off into the forest with his pickaxe. You would come across him round about evening in the most deserted clearings, in the wildest thickets, looking for all the world as if he was searching for something, sometimes digging holes. The good women who passed by took him for Beelzebub, then they recognized Boulatruelle and were scarcely more reassured. These encounters seemed to really throw Boulatruelle. It was obvious that he was trying to hide and that there was some mystery in what he was up to.

They said in the village: “It’s clear the devil has made an appearance. Boulatruelle saw him and he’s searching. Truth is, he’s just the bloke to get his hands on Lucifer’s stash.” The Voltaireans added: “Will Boulatruelle catch the devil or will the devil catch Boulatruelle?” The old women crossed themselves a lot.

But Boulatruelle’s shenanigans in the woods stopped and he went back to his regular hours as a road-mender. People moved on to other things.

A few people, though, remained curious, thinking that what might be involved in the whole business was not the fabulous treasure of legend, but a real windfall, a lot more serious and substantial than the devil’s banknotes, and whose secret Boulatruelle had half-gleaned. The most intrigued were the schoolmaster and Thénardier, the keeper of the low-class inn, who was everybody’s friend but who had not deigned to make friends with Boulatruelle.

“He was in the galleys, eh?” said Thénardier. “Christ! A person doesn’t know who’s coming or going, when it comes to the clink.”

One night the schoolmaster remarked that once upon a time the law would have looked into what Boulatruelle was up to in the woods, and he would have had to talk whether he liked it or not, that they would have used torture on him if need be, and that Boulatruelle would not have stood up to it if, for example, they’d used water torture.

“Give him the booze treatment,” said Thénardier.

They got together and plied the old road-mender with drink. Boulatruelle drank enormously and said little. With admirable art and a masterly sense of proportion, he combined the thirst of a greedy pig with the discretion of a judge. Yet, by dint of returning to the charge and by piecing things together and wringing out of him the few obscure words he inadvertently let slip, this is what Thénardier and the schoolmaster thought they understood: One morning Boulatruelle turned up for work at daybreak and was surprised to see, in a corner of the woods, under a bush, a shovel and a pickaxe that “you’d have to say had been hidden.” But it seems he thought that it was probably the shovel and pickaxe of old Six-Fours, the water carrier, and thought no more about it. But the evening of the same day, he apparently saw, without himself being seen, as he was hidden by a big tree, heading off the road to the thickest part of the wood “an individual who was in no way from round these parts” and that he, Boulatruelle, “knew very well.” Translation courtesy of Thénardier: “a pal from the clink.” Boulatruelle had obstinately refused to say who the man was. This individual was carrying a bundle, something square like a big box or a small chest. Surprise on the part of Boulatruelle. Yet it wasn’t for six or seven minutes, it seems, that the idea of following “the individual” came to him. By then it was too late, the individual was already in the thicket, night had fallen, and Boulatruelle wasn’t able to get to him. So he decided to keep his eye on the edge of the woods. “There was a moon.” Two or three hours later, Boulatruelle saw his individual emerge from the thicket, now carrying not the small chest but a pickaxe and a shovel. Boulatruelle had let the individual pass and it didn’t occur to him to approach him, because he told himself the other bloke was three times as strong as he was and armed with a pickaxe and would probably whack him when he saw who he was and figured out that he’d been recognized. Touching effusions of two old chums who run into each other suddenly. But the shovel and pickaxe had been a flash of light for Boulatruelle; he ran off into the bushes the next morning, but he didn’t find either the shovel or the pickaxe. He concluded that this individual, after entering the wood, had dug a hole with the pickaxe, had buried the chest in it, and had filled the hole in with the shovel. Now, the chest was too small to contain a dead body, so it had to contain money. Hence his investigations. Boulatruelle had explored, probed, and poked around the whole forest and rooted around wherever the ground looked freshly disturbed to him. In vain.

He hadn’t dug up a thing. No one thought any more about it in Montfermeil. There were just a few die-hard rumourmongers who said: “You can be certain that the road-mender from Gagny didn’t root around like that for nothing. The devil’s come, nothing surer.” HOW THE CHAIN ON THE SHACKLES MUST HAVE UNDERGONE PREPARATORY TREATMENT TO BE SHATTERED LIKE THAT WITH ONE WHACK OF THE HAMMER

TOWARD THE END of October of that same year, 1823, the inhabitants of Toulon saw the ship Orion sail back into their port to have some damage repaired, following a bout of rough weather. The Orion was later employed in Brest as a training ship, but at the time it was part of the Mediterranean squadron.

This vessel, disabled as it was, for the sea had treated it badly, made quite an impression when it limped into harbour. It was bearing some flag or other—I can’t remember which—that earned it a regulation eleven-gun salute, returned by it blast for blast, making twenty-two in all. It has been estimated that in salvos, royal and military shows of politeness, exchanges of courteous din, signals of etiquette, formalities of harbour and citadel, sunrises and sunsets, saluted daily by all the fortresses and all the warships, openings and closings of gates, etc., etc., the civilized world all over the globe fires off 150,000 pointless cannon shots every twenty-four hours. At six francs a shot, that means that nine hundred thousand francs a day, or three hundred million a year, goes up in smoke. This is just a detail. And while this is going on, the poor are dying of hunger.

The year 1823 was what the Restoration called “the time of the war with Spain.”1

This war was actually many events rolled into one, with plenty of singularities thrown in for good measure. A big family affair for the Bourbons, the French branch aiding and protecting the branch in Madrid—in other words, performing an act of seniority; an apparent return to our national traditions, complicated by subservience and cringing to the state cabinets of the north; Monsieur le duc d’Angoulême, dubbed by the liberal rags “the hero of Andujar,”2 cracking down, with a triumphal attitude somewhat contradicted by his peaceful air, on the old and very real terrorism of the Holy Office3 as it grappled with the chimerical terrorism of the liberals; the sansculottes resurrected, to the great alarm of the dowagers, under the name of descamisados;4 monarchists striving to impede progress, which they called anarchy; the theories of ‘89 nipped in the bud suddenly, a European “whoa” putting a stop to the French idea making its world tour; alongside the generalissimo son of France,5 the prince de Carignan,6 subsequently Charles-Albert, enlisting in this crusade of kings against peoples as a volunteer with the red wool epaulets of a grenadier; the soldiers of the Empire again going on campaign, though after eight years off, aged, sad, and under the white cockade; the tricolour flag waved around by a heroic handful of Frenchmen just as the white flag had once been in Koblenz,7 thirty years previously; monks blending in with our troops; the spirit of liberty and novelty made to see reason at the end of a bayonet; principles brought down by cannon shot; France undoing with its arms what it had done with its spirit; to top it off, the enemy chiefs sold out, the soldiers hesitant, towns under siege by the teeming millions; no military dangers and yet potential explosions, as with any mine surprised and invaded; little blood shed, little honour won, shame for some, glory for none—such was this war made by princes who were descended from Louis XIV and led by generals who sprang from Napoléon. It had the sad fate of recalling neither great war nor great politics.

A few feats of arms were serious; the taking of the Trocadero, for example, was a fine military campaign; but on the whole, we repeat, the trumpets of this war produced a tinny sound, the ensemble was suspect, and history backs France in her difficulty in accepting this false triumph. It seemed obvious that certain Spanish officers tasked with resisting yielded too easily, the whiff of corruption was given off by the victory; it felt as if it was more a case of the generals having been won than the battles, and the victorious soldier went home humiliated. A demeaning war, indeed, one in which you could read Banque de France between the folds of the flag.

The soldiers of the war of 1808, on top of whom Saragossa8 had so alarmingly collapsed, frowned darkly in 1823 when confronted by the easy sacking of citadels and took to regretting Palafox.9 It is in the nature of France to prefer facing Rostopchine rather than Ballesteros.10 From an even graver point of view—something it is only right to insist on—this war, which rubbed France’s military spirit up the wrong way, outraged the democratic spirit. It was a bid for enslavement. In this campaign, the goal of the French soldier, that son of democracy, was to put others under the yoke. Nasty nonsense. France is made to stir people’s souls, not smother them. Since 1792, all the revolutions of Europe have been the French Revolution; liberty shines out of France. It is a question of the sun. Anyone who does not see it is blind! Bonaparte said so.

The war of 1823, an attack on the generous Spanish nation, was thus at the same time an attack on the French Revolution. This monstrous assault and battery was committed by France—by force; for, aside from wars of liberation, all that armies do, they do by force. The term passive obedience says it all. An army is a strange compound masterpiece in which force results from an enormous sum of impotence. This explains war, made by humanity against humanity in spite of humanity.

As for the Bourbons, the war of 1823 was fatal for them. They mistook it for a success. They did not see the danger in killing an idea with a slogan. In their naïveté, they got things so wrong they introduced into their program, as an element of strength, the enormous weakness of a crime. The spirit of ambush entered into their policy making. The year 1823 sowed the seeds of 1830.11 In their debates, the Spanish campaign became an argument for violent shows of strength and for the shenanigans of divine right. Having reestablished el rey neto in Spain, France could certainly reestablish the absolute monarch on home turf. They fell into the frightening error of mistaking the soldier’s obedience for the nation’s consent. That kind of confidence loses thrones. It doesn’t do to fall asleep, either in the shade of the poisonous manchineel tree or in the shadow of an army.

But let’s get back to the good ship Orion.

During the manoeuvres of the generalissimo prince’s army, a squadron was cruising the Mediterranean. As we have just said, the Orion was part of this squadron and it had been driven back into the port of Toulon by rough seas.

The presence of a warship in a port has something indefinable that pulls the crowds and fills them with wonder. This is because it’s big and crowds love anything big.

A ship of the line is one of the most magnificent encounters between the power of nature and the genius of man.

A ship of the line is composed of both the heaviest and the lightest of materials, because it is tied to three forms of substance at once, solid, liquid, and gas, and has to fight against all three. It has eleven iron claws to seize granite at the bottom of the sea, and more wings and antennae than a winged arthropod to catch the wind in the clouds. Its breath comes out of its one hundred and twenty guns as if through enormous bugles and proudly answers thunder back. The ocean tries to lead it astray with the frightening sameness of its waves, but the vessel has its soul, its compass, which counsels it and always shows it true north. On black nights, its lanterns make up for the stars. And so, against the wind, it has rope and canvas, against water, wood, against rock, iron, copper, and lead, against the darkness, light, and against the vastness, a needle.

If you want to get an idea of all the gigantic proportions that come together to make up a ship of the line, you only have to duck under one of the covered slipways, six stories high, of the ports of Brest or Toulon. Ships being built there sit under a bell jar, so to speak. This colossal beam is a yard; that great wood column stretching along the ground as far as the eye can see is the mainmast. Measuring from its roots in the slipway to its crown in the clouds, it is sixty fathoms high, and it is three feet in diameter at its base. The English mainmast rises two hundred and seventeen feet above the waterline. The navy of our fathers’ day used cables, nowadays we use chains. Just the simple coil of chains of a hundred-gun ship is four feet high, twenty feet wide, and eight feet deep. And to build such a ship, how much wood do you need? Three thousand steres, or cubic metres. It is a floating forest.

And then again, take note, what we are talking about here is merely a military craft of forty years ago, a simple sailing ship; steam, then in its infancy, has since added new miracles to this prodigy known as a warship. At the present day, for example, the hybrid ship with propeller is an amazing machine hauled along by sails three thousand square meters in surface and by a 2500-horsepower boiler.

Forgetting about these new marvels, the old ship of Christopher Columbus and of de Ruyter12 is one of man’s great masterpieces. It is as inexhaustible in power as the infinite is in gusts of wind, it stores the wind in its sails, it is a fixed point in the endlessly spreading waves, it floats and it reigns.

But the moment comes when a squall snaps this sixty-foot yard like a piece of straw, when the wind bends that four-hundred-foot-high mast like a reed, when that anchor, weighing ten thousand pounds, is twisted in the maw of the waves like an angler’s hook in the jaws of a pike, when those monster guns let out plaintive and futile roars that the hurricane carries into the void and into the darkness, when all this power and all this majesty are engulfed by a superior power and majesty.

Every time immense strength is deployed only to end in immense weakness, it makes people think. This is why the curious abound in seaports, without themselves being all that clear why they are there, thronging around these marvellous machines of war and navigation.

Every day, then, from morning to night, the quais, piers, and jetties of the port of Toulon were crawling with idlers and people strolling about—polishing the pavement, as they say in Paris—whose business was to gawk at the Orion.

The Orion had been a sick ship for a long time. In its previous voyages, thick layers of shellfish had built up on its hull to such an extent that they slowed it down to half its speed; it had been put in dry dock the previous year for the crust of shells to be scraped off, and then had put out to sea again. But this scraping job had weakened the bolting on the hull. When it got up around the Balearic Islands, the planking became fatigued and came loose, and since planking was not in those days lined with metal sheeting, the ship took on water. A violent equinoctial gale had blown up and had stoved in the head and a port-hole on the port side and damaged the foresail chainwales. Following this damage, the Orion had put back to Toulon.

It was moored near the Arsenal, and it was being fitted out and repaired. The hull had not been damaged on the starboard side, but a few planks had been pried open here and there, according to custom, to let air into the shell.

One morning the crowd looking on witnessed an accident.

The crew was busy bending sail. The sailor whose job it was to let down the starboard peak of the main topsail lost his balance. He was seen to reel, the throng gathered on the Arsenal quai let out a cry, the man tipped head over heels, he spun around the yard, hands outstretched toward the abyss; as he flew past, he grabbed hold of the loose footropes first with one hand, then with the other, and he remained there, dangling. The sea lay dizzingly far below him. The shock of his fall had jolted the footropes and set them rocking like a swing. The man swung backward and forward at the end of the rope like a stone in a slingshot.

To go to his aid was to run a terrifying risk. None of the sailors, all fishermen from the coast freshly pressed into service, dared to give it a go. But the unfortunate topman was getting tired; you couldn’t see the anguish on his face, but you could see the exhaustion in all his limbs. His arms were horribly stiff from being pulled. Every effort he made to climb back up only served to increase the swinging of the loose footropes. He did not cry out for fear of losing strength. All that was left was to wait for him to let go of the rope and at moments all heads turned away so that they would not see him fall. There are times when a bit of rope, a pole, the branch of a tree, mean the difference between life and death, and it is awful to see a living being let go and drop like ripe fruit.

All of a sudden, a man was seen climbing up the rigging with the agility of a wildcat. This man was dressed in red, he was a convict; he had the green cap of a lifer. When he got to the top, a gust of wind ripped off his cap, revealing a head completely white; this was no young man.

A convict, in fact, employed on board on prison duty, had immediately run to an officer of the watch and in the middle of the confusion and hesitation of the crew, while all the sailors trembled and shrank back, he had asked the officer’s permission to risk his life to save the topman. When the officer gave him the nod, he had used a hammer to break the chain riveted to the iron shackle at his ankle, then he had grabbed a rope and flung himself into the shrouds. No one at that instant noticed how easily the chain had been broken. It was only later that people remembered that.

In the blink of an eye he was over the yard. He stopped for a few seconds and seemed to be weighing it up. Those seconds, during which the wind swung the topman at the end of a thread, felt like centuries to those who watched. At last the convict raised his eyes to the heavens and took a step forward. The crowd breathed again. They saw him run along the yard. When he got to the far end, he tied one end of the rope he had brought to it and let the other end hang, then he started descending, hand over hand, down this rope, and the anguish became unbearable, for instead of one man dangling over the depths, there were two.

You would have said it looked like a spider coming to grab a fly; only here the spider was bringing life, not death. Ten thousand pairs of eyes were fixed on the two of them. Not a cry, not a word; the same quivering brought a frown to every face. Everyone held their breath, as though afraid of adding the slightest puff to the wind that was shaking the two poor wretches.

Yet the convict had managed to haul down next to the topman. Not a moment too soon; one minute more and the man, exhausted and desperate, would have plummeted into the deep; the convict firmly secured him with the rope which he held with one hand while he worked with the other. At last they saw him climb back up the yard, hauling the sailor behind him; he held him for a moment to let him get back his strength, then lifted him in his arms and carried him as he walked back along the yard to the crosstrees and from there to the top, where he left him in the hands of his mates.

At that moment the crowd broke into applause; hardened galley-wardens wept, women hugged each other along the quai, and everyone could be heard shouting in a sort of softened fury: “Give this man a pardon!”

The man, however, had made a point of descending immediately to rejoin his work team. To get there faster, he slid down the rigging and started to run along a lower fore yard. All eyes followed him. At a certain point, everyone felt afraid; either he was tired or he felt dizzy, for it looked as if he hesitated and lurched. Suddenly the crowd gave a great cry. The convict had fallen into the sea.

It was a perilous fall. The frigate Algésiras was moored next to the Orion, and the poor galley slave had fallen in between the two boats. There was a real danger he would slip under one or the other of the two. Four men swiftly leaped into a small boat. The crowd urged them on, anxiety again took hold of everyone. The man had not risen to the surface. He had disappeared in the sea without so much as a ripple, as though he had fallen into a vat of oil. They sounded, they dived. It was in vain. The search continued till nightfall; they did not even find the body.

The next day, the Toulon paper ran these few lines:

November 17, 1823: Yesterday a convict, on duty aboard the Orion, returning from rescuing a sailor, fell into the sea and drowned. His body was not recovered. He is presumed to have got stuck under the piles of the Arsenal pier. This man was jailed under the number 9430 and was called Jean Valjean.