________________________________________________
_ Towards the middle of the night Jean Valjean woke.
Jean Valjean came from a poor peasant family of Brie. He had not learned
to read in his childhood. When he reached man's estate, be became
a tree-pruner at Faverolles. His mother was named Jeanne Mathieu;
his father was called Jean Valjean or Vlajean, probably a sobriquet,
and a contraction of viola Jean, "here's Jean."
Jean Valjean was of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition
which constitutes the peculiarity of affectionate natures.
On the whole, however, there was something decidedly sluggish
and insignificant about Jean Valjean in appearance, at least.
He had lost his father and mother at a very early age. His mother
had died of a milk fever, which had not been properly attended to.
His father, a tree-pruner, like himself, had been killed by a fall
from a tree. All that remained to Jean Valjean was a sister older
than himself,--a widow with seven children, boys and girls.
This sister had brought up Jean Valjean, and so long as she had a
husband she lodged and fed her young brother.
The husband died. The eldest of the seven children was eight
years old. The youngest, one.
Jean Valjean had just attained his twenty-fifth year. He took
the father's place, and, in his turn, supported the sister who had
brought him up. This was done simply as a duty and even a little
churlishly on the part of Jean Valjean. Thus his youth had been spent
in rude and ill-paid toil. He had never known a "kind woman friend"
in his native parts. He had not had the time to fall in love.
He returned at night weary, and ate his broth without uttering a word.
His sister, mother Jeanne, often took the best part of his repast
from his bowl while he was eating,--a bit of meat, a slice of bacon,
the heart of the cabbage,--to give to one of her children.
As he went on eating, with his head bent over the table and almost
into his soup, his long hair falling about his bowl and concealing
his eyes, he had the air of perceiving nothing and allowing it.
There was at Faverolles, not far from the Valjean thatched cottage,
on the other side of the lane, a farmer's wife named Marie-Claude;
the Valjean children, habitually famished, sometimes went to borrow
from Marie-Claude a pint of milk, in their mother's name, which they
drank behind a hedge or in some alley corner, snatching the jug
from each other so hastily that the little girls spilled it on
their aprons and down their necks. If their mother had known of
this marauding, she would have punished the delinquents severely.
Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid Marie-Claude for the
pint of milk behind their mother's back, and the children were
not punished.
In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out
as a hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge.
He did whatever he could. His sister worked also but what could she
do with seven little children? It was a sad group enveloped in misery,
which was being gradually annihilated. A very hard winter came.
Jean had no work. The family had no bread. No bread literally.
Seven children!
One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Church
Square at Faverolles, was preparing to go to bed, when he heard
a violent blow on the grated front of his shop. He arrived in time
to see an arm passed through a hole made by a blow from a fist,
through the grating and the glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread
and carried it off. Isabeau ran out in haste; the robber fled at
the full speed of his legs. Isabeau ran after him and stopped him.
The thief had flung away the loaf, but his arm was still bleeding.
It was Jean Valjean.
This took place in 1795. Jean Valjean was taken before the tribunals
of the time for theft and breaking and entering an inhabited
house at night. He had a gun which he used better than any one
else in the world, he was a bit of a poacher, and this injured
his case. There exists a legitimate prejudice against poachers.
The poacher, like the smuggler, smacks too strongly of the brigand.
Nevertheless, we will remark cursorily, there is still an abyss
between these races of men and the hideous assassin of the towns.
The poacher lives in the forest, the smuggler lives in the mountains
or on the sea. The cities make ferocious men because they make
corrupt men. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men;
they develop the fierce side, but often without destroying the
humane side.
Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty. The terms of the Code
were explicit. There occur formidable hours in our civilization;
there are moments when the penal laws decree a shipwreck.
What an ominous minute is that in which society draws back and
consummates the irreparable abandonment of a sentient being!
Jean Valjean was condemned to five years in the galleys.
On the 22d of April, 1796, the victory of Montenotte, won by the
general-in-chief of the army of Italy, whom the message of the
Directory to the Five Hundred, of the 2d of Floreal, year IV., calls
Buona-Parte, was announced in Paris; on that same day a great gang
of galley-slaves was put in chains at Bicetre. Jean Valjean formed
a part of that gang. An old turnkey of the prison, who is now nearly
eighty years old, still recalls perfectly that unfortunate wretch
who was chained to the end of the fourth line, in the north angle
of the courtyard. He was seated on the ground like the others.
He did not seem to comprehend his position, except that it was horrible.
It is probable that he, also, was disentangling from amid the vague
ideas of a poor man, ignorant of everything, something excessive.
While the bolt of his iron collar was being riveted behind his head
with heavy blows from the hammer, he wept, his tears stifled him,
they impeded his speech; he only managed to say from time to time,
"I was a tree-pruner at Faverolles." Then still sobbing, he raised
his right hand and lowered it gradually seven times, as though
he were touching in succession seven heads of unequal heights,
and from this gesture it was divined that the thing which he had done,
whatever it was, he had done for the sake of clothing and nourishing
seven little children.
He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of
twenty-seven days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon
he was clothed in the red cassock. All that had constituted
his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even
Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601. What became of his sister?
What became of the seven children? Who troubled himself about that?
What becomes of the handful of leaves from the young tree which
is sawed off at the root?
It is always the same story. These poor living beings,
these creatures of God, henceforth without support, without guide,
without refuge, wandered away at random,--who even knows?--
each in his own direction perhaps, and little by little buried
themselves in that cold mist which engulfs solitary destinies;
gloomy shades, into which disappear in succession so many unlucky heads,
in the sombre march of the human race. They quitted the country.
The clock-tower of what had been their village forgot them; the boundary
line of what had been their field forgot them; after a few years'
residence in the galleys, Jean Valjean himself forgot them.
In that heart, where there had been a wound, there was a scar.
That is all. Only once, during all the time which he spent at Toulon,
did he hear his sister mentioned. This happened, I think,
towards the end of the fourth year of his captivity. I know not
through what channels the news reached him. Some one who had known
them in their own country had seen his sister. She was in Paris.
She lived in a poor street Rear Saint-Sulpice, in the Rue du Gindre.
She had with her only one child, a little boy, the youngest.
Where were the other six? Perhaps she did not know herself.
Every morning she went to a printing office, No. 3 Rue du Sabot,
where she was a folder and stitcher. She was obliged to be there
at six o'clock in the morning--long before daylight in winter.
In the same building with the printing office there was a school,
and to this school she took her little boy, who was seven years old.
But as she entered the printing office at six, and the school only
opened at seven, the child had to wait in the courtyard, for the school
to open, for an hour--one hour of a winter night in the open air!
They would not allow the child to come into the printing office,
because he was in the way, they said. When the workmen passed in
the morning, they beheld this poor little being seated on the pavement,
overcome with drowsiness, and often fast asleep in the shadow,
crouched down and doubled up over his basket. When it rained,
an old woman, the portress, took pity on him; she took him into her den,
where there was a pallet, a spinning-wheel, and two wooden chairs,
and the little one slumbered in a corner, pressing himself close
to the cat that he might suffer less from cold. At seven o'clock
the school opened, and he entered. That is what was told to Jean
Valjean.
They talked to him about it for one day; it was a moment, a flash,
as though a window had suddenly been opened upon the destiny of
those things whom he had loved; then all closed again. He heard
nothing more forever. Nothing from them ever reached him again;
he never beheld them; he never met them again; and in the continuation
of this mournful history they will not be met with any more.
Towards the end of this fourth year Jean Valjean's turn to escape
arrived. His comrades assisted him, as is the custom in that sad place.
He escaped. He wandered for two days in the fields at liberty,
if being at liberty is to be hunted, to turn the head every instant,
to quake at the slightest noise, to be afraid of everything,--of a
smoking roof, of a passing man, of a barking dog, of a galloping horse,
of a striking clock, of the day because one can see, of the night
because one cannot see, of the highway, of the path, of a bush,
of sleep. On the evening of the second day he was captured.
He had neither eaten nor slept for thirty-six hours. The maritime
tribunal condemned him, for this crime, to a prolongation of his
term for three years, which made eight years. In the sixth year
his turn to escape occurred again; he availed himself of it,
but could not accomplish his flight fully. He was missing at
roll-call. The cannon were fired, and at night the patrol found
him hidden under the keel of a vessel in process of construction;
he resisted the galley guards who seized him. Escape and rebellion.
This case, provided for by a special code, was punished by an addition
of five years, two of them in the double chain. Thirteen years.
In the tenth year his turn came round again; he again profited by it;
he succeeded no better. Three years for this fresh attempt.
Sixteen years. Finally, I think it was during his thirteenth year,
he made a last attempt, and only succeeded in getting retaken at
the end of four hours of absence. Three years for those four hours.
Nineteen years. In October, 1815, he was released; he had entered
there in 1796, for having broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf
of bread.
Room for a brief parenthesis. This is the second time,
during his studies on the penal question and damnation by law,
that the author of this book has come across the theft of a loaf
of bread as the point of departure for the disaster of a destiny.
Claude Gaux had stolen a loaf; Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf.
English statistics prove the fact that four thefts out of five in
London have hunger for their immediate cause.
Jean Valjean had entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering;
he emerged impassive. He had entered in despair; he emerged gloomy.
What had taken place in that soul? _
Read next: VOLUME I - FANTINE: BOOK SECOND - THE FALL: CHAPTER VII. The Interior of Despair
Read previous: VOLUME I - FANTINE: BOOK SECOND - THE FALL: CHAPTER V. Tranquillity
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