________________________________________________
_ A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE IN PROCESS OF FORMATION
He advanced a pace, closed the door mechanically behind him,
and remained standing, contemplating what he saw.
It was a vast and badly lighted apartment, now full of uproar,
now full of silence, where all the apparatus of a criminal case,
with its petty and mournful gravity in the midst of the throng,
was in process of development.
At the one end of the hall, the one where he was, were judges,
with abstracted air, in threadbare robes, who were gnawing their
nails or closing their eyelids; at the other end, a ragged crowd;
lawyers in all sorts of attitudes; soldiers with hard but honest
faces; ancient, spotted woodwork, a dirty ceiling, tables covered
with serge that was yellow rather than green; doors blackened
by handmarks; tap-room lamps which emitted more smoke than light,
suspended from nails in the wainscot; on the tables candles
in brass candlesticks; darkness, ugliness, sadness; and from
all this there was disengaged an austere and august impression,
for one there felt that grand human thing which is called the law,
and that grand divine thing which is called justice.
No one in all that throng paid any attention to him; all glances
were directed towards a single point, a wooden bench placed against
a small door, in the stretch of wall on the President's left;
on this bench, illuminated by several candles, sat a man between
two gendarmes.
This man was the man.
He did not seek him; he saw him; his eyes went thither naturally,
as though they had known beforehand where that figure was.
He thought he was looking at himself, grown old; not absolutely the
same in face, of course, but exactly similar in attitude and aspect,
with his bristling hair, with that wild and uneasy eye, with that blouse,
just as it was on the day when he entered D----, full of hatred,
concealing his soul in that hideous mass of frightful thoughts which
he had spent nineteen years in collecting on the floor of the prison.
He said to himself with a shudder, "Good God! shall I become
like that again?"
This creature seemed to be at least sixty; there was something
indescribably coarse, stupid, and frightened about him.
At the sound made by the opening door, people had drawn aside to make
way for him; the President had turned his head, and, understanding that
the personage who had just entered was the mayor of M. sur M., he had
bowed to him; the attorney-general, who had seen M. Madeleine at M. sur
M., whither the duties of his office had called him more than once,
recognized him and saluted him also: he had hardly perceived it;
he was the victim of a sort of hallucination; he was watching.
Judges, clerks, gendarmes, a throng of cruelly curious heads, all these he
had already beheld once, in days gone by, twenty-seven years before;
he had encountered those fatal things once more; there they were;
they moved; they existed; it was no longer an effort of his memory,
a mirage of his thought; they were real gendarmes and real judges,
a real crowd, and real men of flesh and blood: it was all over;
he beheld the monstrous aspects of his past reappear and live once
more around him, with all that there is formidable in reality.
All this was yawning before him.
He was horrified by it; he shut his eyes, and exclaimed in the
deepest recesses of his soul, "Never!"
And by a tragic play of destiny which made all his ideas tremble,
and rendered him nearly mad, it was another self of his that was
there! all called that man who was being tried Jean Valjean.
Under his very eyes, unheard-of vision, he had a sort of representation
of the most horrible moment of his life, enacted by his spectre.
Everything was there; the apparatus was the same, the hour of the night,
the faces of the judges, of soldiers, and of spectators; all were
the same, only above the President's head there hung a crucifix,
something which the courts had lacked at the time of his condemnation:
God had been absent when he had been judged.
There was a chair behind him; he dropped into it, terrified at
the thought that he might be seen; when he was seated,
he took advantage of a pile of cardboard boxes, which stood
on the judge's desk, to conceal his face from the whole room;
he could now see without being seen; he had fully regained
consciousness of the reality of things; gradually he recovered;
he attained that phase of composure where it is possible to listen.
M. Bamatabois was one of the jurors.
He looked for Javert, but did not see him; the seat of the
witnesses was hidden from him by the clerk's table, and then,
as we have just said, the hall was sparely lighted.
At the moment of this entrance, the defendant's lawyer had just
finished his plea.
The attention of all was excited to the highest pitch; the affair had
lasted for three hours: for three hours that crowd had been watching
a strange man, a miserable specimen of humanity, either profoundly
stupid or profoundly subtle, gradually bending beneath the weight
of a terrible likeness. This man, as the reader already knows,
was a vagabond who had been found in a field carrying a branch
laden with ripe apples, broken in the orchard of a neighbor,
called the Pierron orchard. Who was this man? an examination
had been made; witnesses had been heard, and they were unanimous;
light had abounded throughout the entire debate; the accusation said:
"We have in our grasp not only a marauder, a stealer of fruit;
we have here, in our hands, a bandit, an old offender who has broken
his ban, an ex-convict, a miscreant of the most dangerous description,
a malefactor named Jean Valjean, whom justice has long been in
search of, and who, eight years ago, on emerging from the galleys
at Toulon, committed a highway robbery, accompanied by violence,
on the person of a child, a Savoyard named Little Gervais; a crime
provided for by article 383 of the Penal Code, the right to try
him for which we reserve hereafter, when his identity shall have
been judicially established. He has just committed a fresh theft;
it is a case of a second offence; condemn him for the fresh deed;
later on he will be judged for the old crime." In the face of
this accusation, in the face of the unanimity of the witnesses,
the accused appeared to be astonished more than anything else;
he made signs and gestures which were meant to convey No,
or else he stared at the ceiling: he spoke with difficulty,
replied with embarrassment, but his whole person, from head to foot,
was a denial; he was an idiot in the presence of all these minds
ranged in order of battle around him, and like a stranger
in the midst of this society which was seizing fast upon him;
nevertheless, it was a question of the most menacing future for him;
the likeness increased every moment, and the entire crowd surveyed,
with more anxiety than he did himself, that sentence freighted
with calamity, which descended ever closer over his head; there was
even a glimpse of a possibility afforded; besides the galleys,
a possible death penalty, in case his identity were established,
and the affair of Little Gervais were to end thereafter in condemnation.
Who was this man? what was the nature of his apathy? was it
imbecility or craft? Did he understand too well, or did he not
understand at all? these were questions which divided the crowd,
and seemed to divide the jury; there was something both terrible
and puzzling in this case: the drama was not only melancholy; it was
also obscure.
The counsel for the defence had spoken tolerably well, in that
provincial tongue which has long constituted the eloquence of the bar,
and which was formerly employed by all advocates, at Paris as well as at
Romorantin or at Montbrison, and which to-day, having become classic,
is no longer spoken except by the official orators of magistracy,
to whom it is suited on account of its grave sonorousness and its
majestic stride; a tongue in which a husband is called a consort,
and a woman a spouse; Paris, the centre of art and civilization;
the king, the monarch; Monseigneur the Bishop, a sainted pontiff;
the district-attorney, the eloquent interpreter of public prosecution;
the arguments, the accents which we have just listened to; the age
of Louis XIV., the grand age; a theatre, the temple of Melpomene;
the reigning family, the august blood of our kings; a concert,
a musical solemnity; the General Commandant of the province,
the illustrious warrior, who, etc.; the pupils in the seminary,
these tender levities; errors imputed to newspapers, the imposture
which distills its venom through the columns of those organs; etc.
The lawyer had, accordingly, begun with an explanation as to the
theft of the apples,--an awkward matter couched in fine style;
but Benigne Bossuet himself was obliged to allude to a chicken
in the midst of a funeral oration, and he extricated himself from
the situation in stately fashion. The lawyer established the fact
that the theft of the apples had not been circumstantially proved.
His client, whom he, in his character of counsel, persisted in
calling Champmathieu, had not been seen scaling that wall nor
breaking that branch by any one. He had been taken with that branch
(which the lawyer preferred to call a bough) in his possession;
but he said that he had found it broken off and lying on the ground,
and had picked it up. Where was there any proof to the contrary?
No doubt that branch had been broken off and concealed after the
scaling of the wall, then thrown away by the alarmed marauder;
there was no doubt that there had been a thief in the case.
But what proof was there that that thief had been Champmathieu?
One thing only. His character as an ex-convict. The lawyer did not
deny that that character appeared to be, unhappily, well attested;
the accused had resided at Faverolles; the accused had exercised
the calling of a tree-pruner there; the name of Champmathieu might
well have had its origin in Jean Mathieu; all that was true,--
in short, four witnesses recognize Champmathieu, positively and
without hesitation, as that convict, Jean Valjean; to these signs,
to this testimony, the counsel could oppose nothing but the denial
of his client, the denial of an interested party; but supposing that he
was the convict Jean Valjean, did that prove that he was the thief
of the apples? that was a presumption at the most, not a proof.
The prisoner, it was true, and his counsel, "in good faith,"
was obliged to admit it, had adopted "a bad system of defence."
He obstinately denied everything, the theft and his character of convict.
An admission upon this last point would certainly have been better,
and would have won for him the indulgence of his judges; the counsel
had advised him to do this; but the accused had obstinately refused,
thinking, no doubt, that he would save everything by admitting nothing.
It was an error; but ought not the paucity of this intelligence
to be taken into consideration? This man was visibly stupid.
Long-continued wretchedness in the galleys, long misery outside
the galleys, had brutalized him, etc. He defended himself badly;
was that a reason for condemning him? As for the affair with
Little Gervais, the counsel need not discuss it; it did not enter
into the case. The lawyer wound up by beseeching the jury and
the court, if the identity of Jean Valjean appeared to them to
be evident, to apply to him the police penalties which are provided
for a criminal who has broken his ban, and not the frightful
chastisement which descends upon the convict guilty of a second
offence.
The district-attorney answered the counsel for the defence.
He was violent and florid, as district-attorneys usually are.
He congratulated the counsel for the defence on his "loyalty," and
skilfully took advantage of this loyalty. He reached the accused
through all the concessions made by his lawyer. The advocate had seemed
to admit that the prisoner was Jean Valjean. He took note of this.
So this man was Jean Valjean. This point had been conceded to the
accusation and could no longer be disputed. Here, by means of a clever
autonomasia which went back to the sources and causes of crime,
the district-attorney thundered against the immorality of the
romantic school, then dawning under the name of the Satanic school,
which had been bestowed upon it by the critics of the Quotidienne
and the Oriflamme; he attributed, not without some probability,
to the influence of this perverse literature the crime of Champmathieu,
or rather, to speak more correctly, of Jean Valjean. Having exhausted
these considerations, he passed on to Jean Valjean himself.
Who was this Jean Valjean? Description of Jean Valjean: a monster
spewed forth, etc. The model for this sort of description is
contained in the tale of Theramene, which is not useful to tragedy,
but which every day renders great services to judicial eloquence.
The audience and the jury "shuddered." The description finished,
the district-attorney resumed with an oratorical turn calculated
to raise the enthusiasm of the journal of the prefecture to
the highest pitch on the following day: And it is such a man,
etc., etc., etc., vagabond, beggar, without means of existence,
etc., etc., inured by his past life to culpable deeds, and but little
reformed by his sojourn in the galleys, as was proved by the crime
committed against Little Gervais, etc., etc.; it is such a man,
caught upon the highway in the very act of theft, a few paces
from a wall that had been scaled, still holding in his hand
the object stolen, who denies the crime, the theft, the climbing
the wall; denies everything; denies even his own identity!
In addition to a hundred other proofs, to which we will not recur,
four witnesses recognize him--Javert, the upright inspector
of police; Javert, and three of his former companions in infamy,
the convicts Brevet, Chenildieu, and Cochepaille. What does he
offer in opposition to this overwhelming unanimity? His denial.
What obduracy! You will do justice, gentlemen of the jury, etc., etc.
While the district-attorney was speaking, the accused listened to him
open-mouthed, with a sort of amazement in which some admiration
was assuredly blended. He was evidently surprised that a man could
talk like that. From time to time, at those "energetic" moments
of the prosecutor's speech, when eloquence which cannot contain itself
overflows in a flood of withering epithets and envelops the accused
like a storm, he moved his head slowly from right to left and from
left to right in the sort of mute and melancholy protest with which
he had contented himself since the beginning of the argument.
Two or three times the spectators who were nearest to him heard him say
in a low voice, "That is what comes of not having asked M. Baloup."
The district-attorney directed the attention of the jury to this
stupid attitude, evidently deliberate, which denoted not imbecility,
but craft, skill, a habit of deceiving justice, and which set
forth in all its nakedness the "profound perversity" of this man.
He ended by making his reserves on the affair of Little Gervais and
demanding a severe sentence.
At that time, as the reader will remember, it was penal servitude
for life.
The counsel for the defence rose, began by complimenting Monsieur
l'Avocat-General on his "admirable speech," then replied as best
he could; but he weakened; the ground was evidently slipping away
from under his feet. _
Read next: VOLUME I - FANTINE: BOOK SEVENTH - THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR: CHAPTER X. The System of Denials
Read previous: VOLUME I - FANTINE: BOOK SEVENTH - THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR: CHAPTER VIII. An Entrance by Favor
Table of content of Les Miserables
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
