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_ Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two. Youth, even in
its sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance.
At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile.
It is the property of grief to cause the childish side of man
to reappear. He had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was
escaping from him. He would have liked to resist, to retain her,
to arouse her enthusiasm by some external and brilliant matter.
These ideas, puerile, as we have just said, and at the same time senile,
conveyed to him, by their very childishness, a tolerably just notion
of the influence of gold lace on the imaginations of young girls.
He once chanced to see a general on horseback, in full uniform,
pass along the street, Comte Coutard, the commandant of Paris.
He envied that gilded man; what happiness it would be, he said to himself,
if he could put on that suit which was an incontestable thing;
and if Cosette could behold him thus, she would be dazzled, and when
he had Cosette on his arm and passed the gates of the Tuileries,
the guard would present arms to him, and that would suffice for Cosette,
and would dispel her idea of looking at young men.
An unforeseen shock was added to these sad reflections.
In the isolated life which they led, and since they had come
to dwell in the Rue Plumet, they had contracted one habit.
They sometimes took a pleasure trip to see the sun rise, a mild
species of enjoyment which befits those who are entering life
and those who are quitting it.
For those who love solitude, a walk in the early morning is equivalent
to a stroll by night, with the cheerfulness of nature added.
The streets are deserted and the birds are singing. Cosette, a bird
herself, liked to rise early. These matutinal excursions were
planned on the preceding evening. He proposed, and she agreed.
It was arranged like a plot, they set out before daybreak,
and these trips were so many small delights for Cosette.
These innocent eccentricities please young people.
Jean Valjean's inclination led him, as we have seen, to the least
frequented spots, to solitary nooks, to forgotten places.
There then existed, in the vicinity of the barriers of Paris,
a sort of poor meadows, which were almost confounded with the city,
where grew in summer sickly grain, and which, in autumn,
after the harvest had been gathered, presented the appearance,
not of having been reaped, but peeled. Jean Valjean loved to haunt
these fields. Cosette was not bored there. It meant solitude
to him and liberty to her. There, she became a little girl
once more, she could run and almost play; she took off her hat,
laid it on Jean Valjean's knees, and gathered bunches of flowers.
She gazed at the butterflies on the flowers, but did not catch them;
gentleness and tenderness are born with love, and the young girl
who cherishes within her breast a trembling and fragile ideal has
mercy on the wing of a butterfly. She wove garlands of poppies,
which she placed on her head, and which, crossed and penetrated
with sunlight, glowing until they flamed, formed for her rosy face a
crown of burning embers.
Even after their life had grown sad, they kept up their custom
of early strolls.
One morning in October, therefore, tempted by the serene perfection
of the autumn of 1831, they set out, and found themselves at break
of day near the Barriere du Maine. It was not dawn, it was daybreak;
a delightful and stern moment. A few constellations here and there
in the deep, pale azure, the earth all black, the heavens all white,
a quiver amid the blades of grass, everywhere the mysterious
chill of twilight. A lark, which seemed mingled with the stars,
was carolling at a prodigious height, and one would have declared
that that hymn of pettiness calmed immensity. In the East,
the Valde-Grace projected its dark mass on the clear horizon
with the sharpness of steel; Venus dazzlingly brilliant was rising
behind that dome and had the air of a soul making its escape from
a gloomy edifice.
All was peace and silence; there was no one on the road;
a few stray laborers, of whom they caught barely a glimpse,
were on their way to their work along the side-paths.
Jean Valjean was sitting in a cross-walk on some planks deposited at
the gate of a timber-yard. His face was turned towards the highway,
his back towards the light; he had forgotten the sun which was on the
point of rising; he had sunk into one of those profound absorptions
in which the mind becomes concentrated, which imprison even the eye,
and which are equivalent to four walls. There are meditations
which may be called vertical; when one is at the bottom of them,
time is required to return to earth. Jean Valjean had plunged into
one of these reveries. He was thinking of Cosette, of the happiness
that was possible if nothing came between him and her, of the light
with which she filled his life, a light which was but the emanation
of her soul. He was almost happy in his revery. Cosette, who was
standing beside him, was gazing at the clouds as they turned rosy.
All at once Cosette exclaimed: "Father, I should think some one
was coming yonder." Jean Valjean raised his eyes.
Cosette was right. The causeway which leads to the ancient Barriere
du Maine is a prolongation, as the reader knows, of the Rue
de Sevres, and is cut at right angles by the inner boulevard.
At the elbow of the causeway and the boulevard, at the spot where
it branches, they heard a noise which it was difficult to account
for at that hour, and a sort of confused pile made its appearance.
Some shapeless thing which was coming from the boulevard was turning
into the road.
It grew larger, it seemed to move in an orderly manner,
though it was bristling and quivering; it seemed to be a vehicle,
but its load could not be distinctly made out. There were horses,
wheels, shouts; whips were cracking. By degrees the outlines
became fixed, although bathed in shadows. It was a vehicle,
in fact, which had just turned from the boulevard into the highway,
and which was directing its course towards the barrier near which sat
Jean Valjean; a second, of the same aspect, followed, then a third,
then a fourth; seven chariots made their appearance in succession,
the heads of the horses touching the rear of the wagon in front.
Figures were moving on these vehicles, flashes were visible
through the dusk as though there were naked swords there,
a clanking became audible which resembled the rattling of chains,
and as this something advanced, the sound of voices waxed louder,
and it turned into a terrible thing such as emerges from the cave
of dreams.
As it drew nearer, it assumed a form, and was outlined behind the trees
with the pallid hue of an apparition; the mass grew white; the day,
which was slowly dawning, cast a wan light on this swarming heap
which was at once both sepulchral and living, the heads of the figures
turned into the faces of corpses, and this is what it proved to be:--
Seven wagons were driving in a file along the road. The first
six were singularly constructed. They resembled coopers' drays;
they consisted of long ladders placed on two wheels and forming
barrows at their rear extremities. Each dray, or rather let us say,
each ladder, was attached to four horses harnessed tandem.
On these ladders strange clusters of men were being drawn.
In the faint light, these men were to be divined rather than seen.
Twenty-four on each vehicle, twelve on a side, back to back,
facing the passers-by, their legs dangling in the air,--this was
the manner in which these men were travelling, and behind their backs
they had something which clanked, and which was a chain, and on
their necks something which shone, and which was an iron collar.
Each man had his collar, but the chain was for all; so that if these
four and twenty men had occasion to alight from the dray and walk,
they were seized with a sort of inexorable unity, and were obliged
to wind over the ground with the chain for a backbone, somewhat after
the fashion of millepeds. In the back and front of each vehicle,
two men armed with muskets stood erect, each holding one end
of the chain under his foot. The iron necklets were square.
The seventh vehicle, a huge rack-sided baggage wagon, without a hood,
had four wheels and six horses, and carried a sonorous pile of
iron boilers, cast-iron pots, braziers, and chains, among which were
mingled several men who were pinioned and stretched at full length,
and who seemed to be ill. This wagon, all lattice-work, was
garnished with dilapidated hurdles which appeared to have served for
former punishments. These vehicles kept to the middle of the road.
On each side marched a double hedge of guards of infamous aspect,
wearing three-cornered hats, like the soldiers under the Directory,
shabby, covered with spots and holes, muffled in uniforms
of veterans and the trousers of undertakers' men, half gray,
half blue, which were almost hanging in rags, with red epaulets,
yellow shoulder belts, short sabres, muskets, and cudgels; they were
a species of soldier-blackguards. These myrmidons seemed composed
of the abjectness of the beggar and the authority of the executioner.
The one who appeared to be their chief held a postilion's whip
in his hand. All these details, blurred by the dimness of dawn,
became more and more clearly outlined as the light increased.
At the head and in the rear of the convoy rode mounted gendarmes,
serious and with sword in fist.
This procession was so long that when the first vehicle reached
the barrier, the last was barely debauching from the boulevard.
A throng, sprung, it is impossible to say whence, and formed in
a twinkling, as is frequently the case in Paris, pressed forward
from both sides of the road and looked on. In the neighboring lanes
the shouts of people calling to each other and the wooden shoes
of market-gardeners hastening up to gaze were audible.
The men massed upon the drays allowed themselves to be jolted
along in silence. They were livid with the chill of morning.
They all wore linen trousers, and their bare feet were thrust into
wooden shoes. The rest of their costume was a fantasy of wretchedness.
Their accoutrements were horribly incongruous; nothing is more funereal
than the harlequin in rags. Battered felt hats, tarpaulin caps,
hideous woollen nightcaps, and, side by side with a short blouse,
a black coat broken at the elbow; many wore women's headgear,
others had baskets on their heads; hairy breasts were visible,
and through the rent in their garments tattooed designs could be descried;
temples of Love, flaming hearts, Cupids; eruptions and unhealthy red
blotches could also be seen. Two or three had a straw rope attached
to the cross-bar of the dray, and suspended under them like a stirrup,
which supported their feet. One of them held in his hand and raised
to his mouth something which had the appearance of a black stone
and which he seemed to be gnawing; it was bread which he was eating.
There were no eyes there which were not either dry, dulled, or flaming
with an evil light. The escort troop cursed, the men in chains did
not utter a syllable; from time to time the sound of a blow became
audible as the cudgels descended on shoulder-blades or skulls;
some of these men were yawning; their rags were terrible; their feet
hung down, their shoulders oscillated, their heads clashed together,
their fetters clanked, their eyes glared ferociously, their fists
clenched or fell open inertly like the hands of corpses; in the rear
of the convoy ran a band of children screaming with laughter.
This file of vehicles, whatever its nature was, was mournful.
It was evident that to-morrow, that an hour hence, a pouring rain
might descend, that it might be followed by another and another,
and that their dilapidated garments would be drenched, that once soaked,
these men would not get dry again, that once chilled, they would
not again get warm, that their linen trousers would be glued to
their bones by the downpour, that the water would fill their shoes,
that no lashes from the whips would be able to prevent their jaws
from chattering, that the chain would continue to bind them
by the neck, that their legs would continue to dangle, and it was
impossible not to shudder at the sight of these human beings thus
bound and passive beneath the cold clouds of autumn, and delivered
over to the rain, to the blast, to all the furies of the air,
like trees and stones.
Blows from the cudgel were not omitted even in the case of the sick men,
who lay there knotted with ropes and motionless on the seventh wagon,
and who appeared to have been tossed there like sacks filled with misery.
Suddenly, the sun made its appearance; the immense light of the Orient
burst forth, and one would have said that it had set fire to all
those ferocious heads. Their tongues were unloosed; a conflagration
of grins, oaths, and songs exploded. The broad horizontal sheet
of light severed the file in two parts, illuminating heads and bodies,
leaving feet and wheels in the obscurity. Thoughts made their
appearance on these faces; it was a terrible moment; visible demons
with their masks removed, fierce souls laid bare. Though lighted up,
this wild throng remained in gloom. Some, who were gay, had in
their mouths quills through which they blew vermin over the crowd,
picking out the women; the dawn accentuated these lamentable
profiles with the blackness of its shadows; there was not one of
these creatures who was not deformed by reason of wretchedness;
and the whole was so monstrous that one would have said that the
sun's brilliancy had been changed into the glare of the lightning.
The wagon-load which headed the line had struck up a song, and were
shouting at the top of their voices with a haggard joviality,
a potpourri by Desaugiers, then famous, called The Vestal; the trees
shivered mournfully; in the cross-lanes, countenances of bourgeois
listened in an idiotic delight to these coarse strains droned by spectres.
All sorts of distress met in this procession as in chaos; here were
to be found the facial angles of every sort of beast, old men, youths,
bald heads, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sour resignation,
savage grins, senseless attitudes, snouts surmounted by caps,
heads like those of young girls with corkscrew curls on the temples,
infantile visages, and by reason of that, horrible thin skeleton faces,
to which death alone was lacking. On the first cart was a negro,
who had been a slave, in all probability, and who could make
a comparison of his chains. The frightful leveller from below,
shame, had passed over these brows; at that degree of abasement,
the last transformations were suffered by all in their extremest depths,
and ignorance, converted into dulness, was the equal of intelligence
converted into despair. There was no choice possible between
these men who appeared to the eye as the flower of the mud.
It was evident that the person who had had the ordering of that
unclean procession had not classified them. These beings had been
fettered and coupled pell-mell, in alphabetical disorder, probably,
and loaded hap-hazard on those carts. Nevertheless, horrors,
when grouped together, always end by evolving a result; all additions
of wretched men give a sum total, each chain exhaled a common soul,
and each dray-load had its own physiognomy. By the side of the one
where they were singing, there was one where they were howling;
a third where they were begging; one could be seen in which they
were gnashing their teeth; another load menaced the spectators,
another blasphemed God; the last was as silent as the tomb.
Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven circles of hell
on the march. The march of the damned to their tortures, performed
in sinister wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot of
the Apocalypse, but, what was more mournful than that, on the gibbet cart.
One of the guards, who had a hook on the end of his cudgel, made a
pretence from time to time, of stirring up this mass of human filth.
An old woman in the crowd pointed them out to her little boy five
years old, and said to him: "Rascal, let that be a warning to you!"
As the songs and blasphemies increased, the man who appeared to be
the captain of the escort cracked his whip, and at that signal
a fearful dull and blind flogging, which produced the sound of hail,
fell upon the seven dray-loads; many roared and foamed at the mouth;
which redoubled the delight of the street urchins who had hastened up,
a swarm of flies on these wounds.
Jean Valjean's eyes had assumed a frightful expression.
They were no longer eyes; they were those deep and glassy objects
which replace the glance in the case of certain wretched men,
which seem unconscious of reality, and in which flames the reflection
of terrors and of catastrophes. He was not looking at a spectacle,
he was seeing a vision. He tried to rise, to flee, to make
his escape; he could not move his feet. Sometimes, the things
that you see seize upon you and hold you fast. He remained nailed
to the spot, petrified, stupid, asking himself, athwart confused
and inexpressible anguish, what this sepulchral persecution signified,
and whence had come that pandemonium which was pursuing him.
All at once, he raised his hand to his brow, a gesture habitual
to those whose memory suddenly returns; he remembered that this was,
in fact, the usual itinerary, that it was customary to make this
detour in order to avoid all possibility of encountering royalty on
the road to Fontainebleau, and that, five and thirty years before,
he had himself passed through that barrier.
Cosette was no less terrified, but in a different way. She did
not understand; what she beheld did not seem to her to be possible;
at length she cried:--
"Father! What are those men in those carts?"
Jean Valjean replied: "Convicts."
"Whither are they going?"
"To the galleys."
At that moment, the cudgelling, multiplied by a hundred hands,
became zealous, blows with the flat of the sword were mingled
with it, it was a perfect storm of whips and clubs; the convicts
bent before it, a hideous obedience was evoked by the torture,
and all held their peace, darting glances like chained wolves.
Cosette trembled in every limb; she resumed:--
"Father, are they still men?"
"Sometimes," answered the unhappy man.
It was the chain-gang, in fact, which had set out before daybreak
from Bicetre, and had taken the road to Mans in order to avoid
Fontainebleau, where the King then was. This caused the horrible
journey to last three or four days longer; but torture may surely
be prolonged with the object of sparing the royal personage a sight of it.
Jean Valjean returned home utterly overwhelmed. Such encounters
are shocks, and the memory that they leave behind them resembles
a thorough shaking up.
Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not observe that, on his way back
to the Rue de Babylone with Cosette, the latter was plying him
with other questions on the subject of what they had just seen;
perhaps he was too much absorbed in his own dejection to notice
her words and reply to them. But when Cosette was leaving him
in the evening, to betake herself to bed, he heard her say in a
low voice, and as though talking to herself: "It seems to me,
that if I were to find one of those men in my pathway, oh, my God,
I should die merely from the sight of him close at hand."
Fortunately, chance ordained that on the morrow of that tragic day,
there was some official solemnity apropos of I know not what,--
fetes in Paris, a review in the Champ de Mars, jousts on the Seine,
theatrical performances in the Champs-Elysees, fireworks at
the Arc de l'Etoile, illuminations everywhere. Jean Valjean did
violence to his habits, and took Cosette to see these rejoicings,
for the purpose of diverting her from the memory of the day before,
and of effacing, beneath the smiling tumult of all Paris,
the abominable thing which had passed before her. The review
with which the festival was spiced made the presence of uniforms
perfectly natural; Jean Valjean donned his uniform of a national
guard with the vague inward feeling of a man who is betaking himself
to shelter. However, this trip seemed to attain its object.
Cosette, who made it her law to please her father, and to whom,
moreover, all spectacles were a novelty, accepted this diversion
with the light and easy good grace of youth, and did not pout too
disdainfully at that flutter of enjoyment called a public fete;
so that Jean Valjean was able to believe that he had succeeded,
and that no trace of that hideous vision remained.
Some days later, one morning, when the sun was shining brightly,
and they were both on the steps leading to the garden, another infraction
of the rules which Jean Valjean seemed to have imposed upon himself,
and to the custom of remaining in her chamber which melancholy had
caused Cosette to adopt, Cosette, in a wrapper, was standing erect
in that negligent attire of early morning which envelops young girls
in an adorable way and which produces the effect of a cloud drawn over
a star; and, with her head bathed in light, rosy after a good sleep,
submitting to the gentle glances of the tender old man, she was picking
a daisy to pieces. Cosette did not know the delightful legend,
I love a little, passionately, etc.--who was there who could
have taught her? She was handling the flower instinctively,
innocently, without a suspicion that to pluck a daisy apart is to
do the same by a heart. If there were a fourth, and smiling Grace
called Melancholy, she would have worn the air of that Grace.
Jean Valjean was fascinated by the contemplation of those tiny
fingers on that flower, and forgetful of everything in the radiance
emitted by that child. A red-breast was warbling in the thicket,
on one side. White cloudlets floated across the sky, so gayly,
that one would have said that they had just been set at liberty.
Cosette went on attentively tearing the leaves from her flower;
she seemed to be thinking about something; but whatever it was,
it must be something charming; all at once she turned her head
over her shoulder with the delicate languor of a swan, and said
to Jean Valjean: "Father, what are the galleys like?" _
Read next: VOLUME IV: BOOK FOURTH - SUCCOR FROM BELOW MAY TURN OUT TO BE SUCCOR FROM ON HIGH: CHAPTER I. A Wound without, Healing within
Read previous: VOLUME IV: BOOK THIRD - THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET: CHAPTER VII. To One Sadness oppose a Sadness and a Half
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