________________________________________________
_ Let us try to say it.
It is necessary that society should look at these things, because it
is itself which creates them.
He was, as we have said, an ignorant man, but he was not a fool.
The light of nature was ignited in him. Unhappiness, which also
possesses a clearness of vision of its own, augmented the small
amount of daylight which existed in this mind. Beneath the cudgel,
beneath the chain, in the cell, in hardship, beneath the burning sun
of the galleys, upon the plank bed of the convict, he withdrew into
his own consciousness and meditated.
He constituted himself the tribunal.
He began by putting himself on trial.
He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man unjustly punished.
He admitted that he had committed an extreme and blameworthy act;
that that loaf of bread would probably not have been refused to him
had he asked for it; that, in any case, it would have been better
to wait until he could get it through compassion or through work;
that it is not an unanswerable argument to say, "Can one wait when one
is hungry?" That, in the first place, it is very rare for any one to die
of hunger, literally; and next, that, fortunately or unfortunately,
man is so constituted that he can suffer long and much, both morally
and physically, without dying; that it is therefore necessary to
have patience; that that would even have been better for those poor
little children; that it had been an act of madness for him, a miserable,
unfortunate wretch, to take society at large violently by the collar,
and to imagine that one can escape from misery through theft;
that that is in any case a poor door through which to escape from
misery through which infamy enters; in short, that he was in the wrong.
Then he asked himself--
Whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal history.
Whether it was not a serious thing, that he, a laborer, out of work,
that he, an industrious man, should have lacked bread. And whether,
the fault once committed and confessed, the chastisement had not been
ferocious and disproportioned. Whether there had not been more abuse
on the part of the law, in respect to the penalty, than there had been
on the part of the culprit in respect to his fault. Whether there
had not been an excess of weights in one balance of the scale,
in the one which contains expiation. Whether the over-weight
of the penalty was not equivalent to the annihilation of the crime,
and did not result in reversing the situation, of replacing the fault
of the delinquent by the fault of the repression, of converting
the guilty man into the victim, and the debtor into the creditor,
and of ranging the law definitely on the side of the man who had
violated it.
Whether this penalty, complicated by successive aggravations for
attempts at escape, had not ended in becoming a sort of outrage
perpetrated by the stronger upon the feebler, a crime of society
against the individual, a crime which was being committed afresh
every day, a crime which had lasted nineteen years.
He asked himself whether human society could have the right to force
its members to suffer equally in one case for its own unreasonable
lack of foresight, and in the other case for its pitiless foresight;
and to seize a poor man forever between a defect and an excess,
a default of work and an excess of punishment.
Whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely
those of its members who were the least well endowed in the division
of goods made by chance, and consequently the most deserving
of consideration.
These questions put and answered, he judged society and condemned it.
He condemned it to his hatred.
He made it responsible for the fate which he was suffering, and he said
to himself that it might be that one day he should not hesitate to call
it to account. He declared to himself that there was no equilibrium
between the harm which he had caused and the harm which was being
done to him; he finally arrived at the conclusion that his punishment
was not, in truth, unjust, but that it most assuredly was iniquitous.
Anger may be both foolish and absurd; one can be irritated wrongfully;
one is exasperated only when there is some show of right on one's
side at bottom. Jean Valjean felt himself exasperated.
And besides, human society had done him nothing but harm; he had never
seen anything of it save that angry face which it calls Justice,
and which it shows to those whom it strikes. Men had only touched
him to bruise him. Every contact with them had been a blow.
Never, since his infancy, since the days of his mother, of his sister,
had he ever encountered a friendly word and a kindly glance.
From suffering to suffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction
that life is a war; and that in this war he was the conquered.
He had no other weapon than his hate. He resolved to whet it
in the galleys and to bear it away with him when he departed.
There was at Toulon a school for the convicts, kept by the
Ignorantin friars, where the most necessary branches were taught
to those of the unfortunate men who had a mind for them. He was of
the number who had a mind. He went to school at the age of forty,
and learned to read, to write, to cipher. He felt that to fortify
his intelligence was to fortify his hate. In certain cases,
education and enlightenment can serve to eke out evil.
This is a sad thing to say; after having judged society, which had
caused his unhappiness, he judged Providence, which had made society,
and he condemned it also.
Thus during nineteen years of torture and slavery, this soul
mounted and at the same time fell. Light entered it on one side,
and darkness on the other.
Jean Valjean had not, as we have seen, an evil nature. He was still
good when he arrived at the galleys. He there condemned society,
and felt that he was becoming wicked; he there condemned Providence,
and was conscious that he was becoming impious.
It is difficult not to indulge in meditation at this point.
Does human nature thus change utterly and from top to bottom?
Can the man created good by God be rendered wicked by man?
Can the soul be completely made over by fate, and become evil,
fate being evil? Can the heart become misshapen and contract
incurable deformities and infirmities under the oppression of a
disproportionate unhappiness, as the vertebral column beneath
too low a vault? Is there not in every human soul, was there
not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, a first spark,
a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in the other,
which good can develop, fan, ignite, and make to glow with splendor,
and which evil can never wholly extinguish?
Grave and obscure questions, to the last of which every physiologist
would probably have responded no, and that without hesitation,
had he beheld at Toulon, during the hours of repose, which were
for Jean Valjean hours of revery, this gloomy galley-slave, seated
with folded arms upon the bar of some capstan, with the end of his
chain thrust into his pocket to prevent its dragging, serious, silent,
and thoughtful, a pariah of the laws which regarded the man with wrath,
condemned by civilization, and regarding heaven with severity.
Certainly,--and we make no attempt to dissimulate the fact,--
the observing physiologist would have beheld an irremediable misery;
he would, perchance, have pitied this sick man, of the law's making;
but he would not have even essayed any treatment; he would have
turned aside his gaze from the caverns of which he would have caught
a glimpse within this soul, and, like Dante at the portals of hell,
he would have effaced from this existence the word which the finger
of God has, nevertheless, inscribed upon the brow of every man,--hope.
Was this state of his soul, which we have attempted to analyze,
as perfectly clear to Jean Valjean as we have tried to render it
for those who read us? Did Jean Valjean distinctly perceive,
after their formation, and had he seen distinctly during the process
of their formation, all the elements of which his moral misery
was composed? Had this rough and unlettered man gathered a perfectly
clear perception of the succession of ideas through which he had,
by degrees, mounted and descended to the lugubrious aspects which had,
for so many years, formed the inner horizon of his spirit?
Was he conscious of all that passed within him, and of all that was
working there? That is something which we do not presume to state;
it is something which we do not even believe. There was too much
ignorance in Jean Valjean, even after his misfortune, to prevent much
vagueness from still lingering there. At times he did not rightly know
himself what he felt. Jean Valjean was in the shadows; he suffered
in the shadows; he hated in the shadows; one might have said that he
hated in advance of himself. He dwelt habitually in this shadow,
feeling his way like a blind man and a dreamer. Only, at intervals,
there suddenly came to him, from without and from within, an access
of wrath, a surcharge of suffering, a livid and rapid flash which
illuminated his whole soul, and caused to appear abruptly all
around him, in front, behind, amid the gleams of a frightful light,
the hideous precipices and the sombre perspective of his destiny.
The flash passed, the night closed in again; and where was he?
He no longer knew. The peculiarity of pains of this nature,
in which that which is pitiless--that is to say, that which
is brutalizing--predominates, is to transform a man, little by
little, by a sort of stupid transfiguration, into a wild beast;
sometimes into a ferocious beast.
Jean Valjean's successive and obstinate attempts at escape would
alone suffice to prove this strange working of the law upon
the human soul. Jean Valjean would have renewed these attempts,
utterly useless and foolish as they were, as often as the opportunity
had presented itself, without reflecting for an instant on the result,
nor on the experiences which he had already gone through.
He escaped impetuously, like the wolf who finds his cage open.
Instinct said to him, "Flee!" Reason would have said, "Remain!"
But in the presence of so violent a temptation, reason vanished;
nothing remained but instinct. The beast alone acted. When he
was recaptured, the fresh severities inflicted on him only served
to render him still more wild.
One detail, which we must not omit, is that he possessed a physical
strength which was not approached by a single one of the denizens of
the galleys. At work, at paying out a cable or winding up a capstan,
Jean Valjean was worth four men. He sometimes lifted and sustained
enormous weights on his back; and when the occasion demanded it,
he replaced that implement which is called a jack-screw, and was
formerly called orgueil [pride], whence, we may remark in passing,
is derived the name of the Rue Montorgueil, near the Halles [Fishmarket]
in Paris. His comrades had nicknamed him Jean the Jack-screw. Once,
when they were repairing the balcony of the town-hall at Toulon,
one of those admirable caryatids of Puget, which support the balcony,
became loosened, and was on the point of falling. Jean Valjean,
who was present, supported the caryatid with his shoulder, and gave
the workmen time to arrive.
His suppleness even exceeded his strength. Certain convicts
who were forever dreaming of escape, ended by making a veritable
science of force and skill combined. It is the science of muscles.
An entire system of mysterious statics is daily practised
by prisoners, men who are forever envious of the flies and birds.
To climb a vertical surface, and to find points of support
where hardly a projection was visible, was play to Jean Valjean.
An angle of the wall being given, with the tension of his back
and legs, with his elbows and his heels fitted into the unevenness
of the stone, he raised himself as if by magic to the third story.
He sometimes mounted thus even to the roof of the galley prison.
He spoke but little. He laughed not at all. An excessive emotion
was required to wring from him, once or twice a year, that lugubrious
laugh of the convict, which is like the echo of the laugh of a demon.
To all appearance, he seemed to be occupied in the constant
contemplation of something terrible.
He was absorbed, in fact.
Athwart the unhealthy perceptions of an incomplete nature and
a crushed intelligence, he was confusedly conscious that some
monstrous thing was resting on him. In that obscure and wan
shadow within which he crawled, each time that he turned his
neck and essayed to raise his glance, he perceived with terror,
mingled with rage, a sort of frightful accumulation of things,
collecting and mounting above him, beyond the range of his vision,--
laws, prejudices, men, and deeds,--whose outlines escaped him,
whose mass terrified him, and which was nothing else than that
prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. He distinguished,
here and there in that swarming and formless mass, now near him,
now afar off and on inaccessible table-lands, some group, some detail,
vividly illuminated; here the galley-sergeant and his cudgel;
there the gendarme and his sword; yonder the mitred archbishop;
away at the top, like a sort of sun, the Emperor, crowned and dazzling.
It seemed to him that these distant splendors, far from dissipating
his night, rendered it more funereal and more black. All this--
laws, prejudices, deeds, men, things--went and came above him,
over his head, in accordance with the complicated and mysterious movement
which God imparts to civilization, walking over him and crushing him
with I know not what peacefulness in its cruelty and inexorability
in its indifference. Souls which have fallen to the bottom of all
possible misfortune, unhappy men lost in the lowest of those limbos at
which no one any longer looks, the reproved of the law, feel the whole
weight of this human society, so formidable for him who is without,
so frightful for him who is beneath, resting upon their heads.
In this situation Jean Valjean meditated; and what could
be the nature of his meditation?
If the grain of millet beneath the millstone had thoughts,
it would, doubtless, think that same thing which Jean Valjean thought.
All these things, realities full of spectres, phantasmagories full
of realities, had eventually created for him a sort of interior
state which is almost indescribable.
At times, amid his convict toil, he paused. He fell to thinking.
His reason, at one and the same time riper and more troubled
than of yore, rose in revolt. Everything which had happened
to him seemed to him absurd; everything that surrounded him
seemed to him impossible. He said to himself, "It is a dream."
He gazed at the galley-sergeant standing a few paces from him;
the galley-sergeant seemed a phantom to him. All of a sudden the
phantom dealt him a blow with his cudgel.
Visible nature hardly existed for him. It would almost be
true to say that there existed for Jean Valjean neither sun,
nor fine summer days, nor radiant sky, nor fresh April dawns.
I know not what vent-hole daylight habitually illumined his soul.
To sum up, in conclusion, that which can be summed up and translated
into positive results in all that we have just pointed out,
we will confine ourselves to the statement that, in the course
of nineteen years, Jean Valjean, the inoffensive tree-pruner
of Faverolles, the formidable convict of Toulon, had become capable,
thanks to the manner in which the galleys had moulded him, of two
sorts of evil action: firstly, of evil action which was rapid,
unpremeditated, dashing, entirely instinctive, in the nature of
reprisals for the evil which he had undergone; secondly, of evil action
which was serious, grave, consciously argued out and premeditated,
with the false ideas which such a misfortune can furnish. His deliberate
deeds passed through three successive phases, which natures of a
certain stamp can alone traverse,--reasoning, will, perseverance.
He had for moving causes his habitual wrath, bitterness of soul,
a profound sense of indignities suffered, the reaction even against
the good, the innocent, and the just, if there are any such.
The point of departure, like the point of arrival, for all his thoughts,
was hatred of human law; that hatred which, if it be not arrested
in its development by some providential incident, becomes, within a
given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race,
then the hatred of creation, and which manifests itself by a vague,
incessant, and brutal desire to do harm to some living being,
no matter whom. It will be perceived that it was not without
reason that Jean Valjean's passport described him as a very dangerous man.
From year to year this soul had dried away slowly, but with fatal
sureness. When the heart is dry, the eye is dry. On his departure
from the galleys it had been nineteen years since he had shed a tear. _
Read next: VOLUME I - FANTINE: BOOK SECOND - THE FALL: CHAPTER VIII. Billows and Shadows
Read previous: VOLUME I - FANTINE: BOOK SECOND - THE FALL: CHAPTER VI. Jean Valjean
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