________________________________________________
_ What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections
of the soul? Man is a depth still greater than the people.
Jean Valjean at that very moment was the prey of a terrible upheaval.
Every sort of gulf had opened again within him. He also was trembling,
like Paris, on the brink of an obscure and formidable revolution.
A few hours had sufficed to bring this about. His destiny and his
conscience had suddenly been covered with gloom. Of him also,
as well as of Paris, it might have been said: "Two principles are
face to face. The white angel and the black angel are about to seize
each other on the bridge of the abyss. Which of the two will hurl
the other over? Who will carry the day?"
On the evening preceding this same 5th of June, Jean Valjean,
accompanied by Cosette and Toussaint had installed himself in the Rue
de l'Homme Arme. A change awaited him there.
Cosette had not quitted the Rue Plumet without making an effort
at resistance. For the first time since they had lived side by side,
Cosette's will and the will of Jean Valjean had proved to be distinct,
and had been in opposition, at least, if they had not clashed.
There had been objections on one side and inflexibility on the other.
The abrupt advice: "Leave your house," hurled at Jean Valjean by
a stranger, had alarmed him to the extent of rendering him peremptory.
He thought that he had been traced and followed. Cosette had been
obliged to give way.
Both had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme without opening their lips,
and without uttering a word, each being absorbed in his own personal
preoccupation; Jean Valjean so uneasy that he did not notice Cosette's
sadness, Cosette so sad that she did not notice Jean Valjean's uneasiness.
Jean Valjean had taken Toussaint with him, a thing which he had
never done in his previous absences. He perceived the possibility
of not returning to the Rue Plumet, and he could neither leave
Toussaint behind nor confide his secret to her. Besides, he felt
that she was devoted and trustworthy. Treachery between master
and servant begins in curiosity. Now Toussaint, as though she
had been destined to be Jean Valjean's servant, was not curious.
She stammered in her peasant dialect of Barneville: "I am made so;
I do my work; the rest is no affair of mine."
In this departure from the Rue Plumet, which had been almost
a flight, Jean Valjean had carried away nothing but the little
embalmed valise, baptized by Cosette "the inseparable."
Full trunks would have required porters, and porters are witnesses.
A fiacre had been summoned to the door on the Rue de Babylone,
and they had taken their departure.
It was with difficulty that Toussaint had obtained permission
to pack up a little linen and clothes and a few toilet articles.
Cosette had taken only her portfolio and her blotting-book.
Jean Valjean, with a view to augmenting the solitude and the mystery
of this departure, had arranged to quit the pavilion of the Rue Plumet
only at dusk, which had allowed Cosette time to write her note to Marius.
They had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme after night had fully fallen.
They had gone to bed in silence.
The lodgings in the Rue de l'Homme Arme were situated on a back court,
on the second floor, and were composed of two sleeping-rooms, a
dining-room and a kitchen adjoining the dining-room, with a garret
where there was a folding-bed, and which fell to Toussaint's share.
The dining-room was an antechamber as well, and separated the
two bedrooms. The apartment was provided with all necessary utensils.
People re-acquire confidence as foolishly as they lose it; human nature
is so constituted. Hardly had Jean Valjean reached the Rue de l'Homme
Arme when his anxiety was lightened and by degrees dissipated.
There are soothing spots which act in some sort mechanically on
the mind. An obscure street, peaceable inhabitants. Jean Valjean
experienced an indescribable contagion of tranquillity in that alley
of ancient Paris, which is so narrow that it is barred against carriages
by a transverse beam placed on two posts, which is deaf and dumb
in the midst of the clamorous city, dimly lighted at mid-day, and is,
so to speak, incapable of emotions between two rows of lofty houses
centuries old, which hold their peace like ancients as they are.
There was a touch of stagnant oblivion in that street. Jean Valjean
drew his breath once more there. How could he be found there?
His first care was to place the inseparable beside him.
He slept well. Night brings wisdom; we may add, night soothes.
On the following morning he awoke in a mood that was almost gay.
He thought the dining-room charming, though it was hideous,
furnished with an old round table, a long sideboard surmounted
by a slanting mirror, a dilapidated arm-chair, and several plain
chairs which were encumbered with Toussaint's packages. In one of
these packages Jean Valjean's uniform of a National Guard was visible
through a rent.
As for Cosette, she had had Toussaint take some broth to her room,
and did not make her appearance until evening.
About five o'clock, Toussaint, who was going and coming and busying
herself with the tiny establishment, set on the table a cold chicken,
which Cosette, out of deference to her father, consented to glance at.
That done, Cosette, under the pretext of an obstinate sick headache,
had bade Jean Valjean good night and had shut herself up in her chamber.
Jean Valjean had eaten a wing of the chicken with a good appetite,
and with his elbows on the table, having gradually recovered
his serenity, had regained possession of his sense of security.
While he was discussing this modest dinner, he had, twice or thrice,
noticed in a confused way, Toussaint's stammering words as she said
to him: "Monsieur, there is something going on, they are fighting
in Paris." But absorbed in a throng of inward calculations,
he had paid no heed to it. To tell the truth, he had not heard her.
He rose and began to pace from the door to the window and from the
window to the door, growing ever more serene.
With this calm, Cosette, his sole anxiety, recurred to his thoughts.
Not that he was troubled by this headache, a little nervous crisis,
a young girl's fit of sulks, the cloud of a moment, there would be
nothing left of it in a day or two; but he meditated on the future,
and, as was his habit, he thought of it with pleasure. After all,
he saw no obstacle to their happy life resuming its course.
At certain hours, everything seems impossible, at others everything
appears easy; Jean Valjean was in the midst of one of these good hours.
They generally succeed the bad ones, as day follows night, by virtue
of that law of succession and of contrast which lies at the very
foundation of nature, and which superficial minds call antithesis.
In this peaceful street where he had taken refuge, Jean Valjean
got rid of all that had been troubling him for some time past.
This very fact, that he had seen many shadows, made him begin
to perceive a little azure. To have quitted the Rue Plumet without
complications or incidents was one good step already accomplished.
Perhaps it would be wise to go abroad, if only for a few months,
and to set out for London. Well, they would go. What difference did
it make to him whether he was in France or in England, provided he
had Cosette beside him? Cosette was his nation. Cosette sufficed
for his happiness; the idea that he, perhaps, did not suffice for
Cosette's happiness, that idea which had formerly been the cause of his
fever and sleeplessness, did not even present itself to his mind.
He was in a state of collapse from all his past sufferings, and he
was fully entered on optimism. Cosette was by his side, she seemed
to be his; an optical illusion which every one has experienced.
He arranged in his own mind, with all sorts of felicitous devices,
his departure for England with Cosette, and he beheld his felicity
reconstituted wherever he pleased, in the perspective of his revery.
As he paced to and fro with long strides, his glance suddenly
encountered something strange.
In the inclined mirror facing him which surmounted the sideboard,
he saw the four lines which follow:--
"My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately.
We shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7.
In a week we shall be in England. COSETTE. June 4th."
Jean Valjean halted, perfectly haggard.
Cosette on her arrival had placed her blotting-book on the sideboard
in front of the mirror, and, utterly absorbed in her agony of grief,
had forgotten it and left it there, without even observing that she
had left it wide open, and open at precisely the page on which she
had laid to dry the four lines which she had penned, and which she
had given in charge of the young workman in the Rue Plumet.
The writing had been printed off on the blotter.
The mirror reflected the writing.
The result was, what is called in geometry, the symmetrical image;
so that the writing, reversed on the blotter, was righted in the
mirror and presented its natural appearance; and Jean Valjean
had beneath his eyes the letter written by Cosette to Marius
on the preceding evening.
It was simple and withering.
Jean Valjean stepped up to the mirror. He read the four lines again,
but he did not believe them. They produced on him the effect
of appearing in a flash of lightning. It was a hallucination,
it was impossible. It was not so.
Little by little, his perceptions became more precise; he looked
at Cosette's blotting-book, and the consciousness of the reality
returned to him. He caught up the blotter and said: "It comes
from there." He feverishly examined the four lines imprinted
on the blotter, the reversal of the letters converted into an
odd scrawl, and he saw no sense in it. Then he said to himself:
"But this signifies nothing; there is nothing written here."
And he drew a long breath with inexpressible relief. Who has not
experienced those foolish joys in horrible instants? The soul does
not surrender to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.
He held the blotter in his hand and contemplated it in stupid delight,
almost ready to laugh at the hallucination of which he had been
the dupe. All at once his eyes fell upon the mirror again,
and again he beheld the vision. There were the four lines
outlined with inexorable clearness. This time it was no mirage.
The recurrence of a vision is a reality; it was palpable, it was
the writing restored in the mirror. He understood.
Jean Valjean tottered, dropped the blotter, and fell into the old
arm-chair beside the buffet, with drooping head, and glassy eyes,
in utter bewilderment. He told himself that it was plain, that the
light of the world had been eclipsed forever, and that Cosette
had written that to some one. Then he heard his soul, which had
become terrible once more, give vent to a dull roar in the gloom.
Try then the effect of taking from the lion the dog which he has
in his cage!
Strange and sad to say, at that very moment, Marius had not yet
received Cosette's letter; chance had treacherously carried it
to Jean Valjean before delivering it to Marius. Up to that day,
Jean Valjean had not been vanquished by trial. He had been subjected
to fearful proofs; no violence of bad fortune had been spared him;
the ferocity of fate, armed with all vindictiveness and all
social scorn, had taken him for her prey and had raged against him.
He had accepted every extremity when it had been necessary;
he had sacrificed his inviolability as a reformed man, had yielded up
his liberty, risked his head, lost everything, suffered everything,
and he had remained disinterested and stoical to such a point that he
might have been thought to be absent from himself like a martyr.
His conscience inured to every assault of destiny, might have
appeared to be forever impregnable. Well, any one who had beheld
his spiritual self would have been obliged to concede that it weakened
at that moment. It was because, of all the tortures which he had
undergone in the course of this long inquisition to which destiny
had doomed him, this was the most terrible. Never had such pincers
seized him hitherto. He felt the mysterious stirring of all his
latent sensibilities. He felt the plucking at the strange chord.
Alas! the supreme trial, let us say rather, the only trial,
is the loss of the beloved being.
Poor old Jean Valjean certainly did not love Cosette otherwise than as
a father; but we have already remarked, above, that into this paternity
the widowhood of his life had introduced all the shades of love;
he loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother,
and he loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either
a woman to love or a wife, as nature is a creditor who accepts
no protest, that sentiment also, the most impossible to lose,
was mingled with the rest, vague, ignorant, pure with the purity
of blindness, unconscious, celestial, angelic, divine; less like
a sentiment than like an instinct, less like an instinct than
like an imperceptible and invisible but real attraction; and love,
properly speaking, was, in his immense tenderness for Cosette,
like the thread of gold in the mountain, concealed and virgin.
Let the reader recall the situation of heart which we have
already indicated. No marriage was possible between them;
not even that of souls; and yet, it is certain that their destinies
were wedded. With the exception of Cosette, that is to say,
with the exception of a childhood, Jean Valjean had never, in the
whole of his long life, known anything of that which may be loved.
The passions and loves which succeed each other had not produced
in him those successive green growths, tender green or dark green,
which can be seen in foliage which passes through the winter and in men
who pass fifty. In short, and we have insisted on it more than once,
all this interior fusion, all this whole, of which the sum total was
a lofty virtue, ended in rendering Jean Valjean a father to Cosette.
A strange father, forged from the grandfather, the son, the brother,
and the husband, that existed in Jean Valjean; a father in whom
there was included even a mother; a father who loved Cosette
and adored her, and who held that child as his light, his home,
his family, his country, his paradise.
Thus when he saw that the end had absolutely come, that she was
escaping from him, that she was slipping from his hands, that she
was gliding from him, like a cloud, like water, when he had before
his eyes this crushing proof: "another is the goal of her heart,
another is the wish of her life; there is a dearest one, I am no
longer anything but her father, I no longer exist"; when he could no
longer doubt, when he said to himself: "She is going away from me!"
the grief which he felt surpassed the bounds of possibility.
To have done all that he had done for the purpose of ending like this!
And the very idea of being nothing! Then, as we have just said,
a quiver of revolt ran through him from head to foot. He felt,
even in the very roots of his hair, the immense reawakening of egotism,
and the _I_ in this man's abyss howled.
There is such a thing as the sudden giving way of the inward subsoil.
A despairing certainty does not make its way into a man without
thrusting aside and breaking certain profound elements which,
in some cases, are the very man himself. Grief, when it attains
this shape, is a headlong flight of all the forces of the conscience.
These are fatal crises. Few among us emerge from them still
like ourselves and firm in duty. When the limit of endurance
is overstepped, the most imperturbable virtue is disconcerted.
Jean Valjean took the blotter again, and convinced himself afresh;
he remained bowed and as though petrified and with staring eyes,
over those four unobjectionable lines; and there arose within him such
a cloud that one might have thought that everything in this soul was
crumbling away.
He examined this revelation, athwart the exaggerations of revery,
with an apparent and terrifying calmness, for it is a fearful thing
when a man's calmness reaches the coldness of the statue.
He measured the terrible step which his destiny had taken without
his having a suspicion of the fact; he recalled his fears of the
preceding summer, so foolishly dissipated; he recognized the precipice,
it was still the same; only, Jean Valjean was no longer on the brink,
he was at the bottom of it.
The unprecedented and heart-rending thing about it was that he had
fallen without perceiving it. All the light of his life had departed,
while he still fancied that he beheld the sun.
His instinct did not hesitate. He put together certain circumstances,
certain dates, certain blushes and certain pallors on Cosette's part,
and he said to himself: "It is he."
The divination of despair is a sort of mysterious bow which never
misses its aim. He struck Marius with his first conjecture.
He did not know the name, but he found the man instantly.
He distinctly perceived, in the background of the implacable
conjuration of his memories, the unknown prowler of the Luxembourg,
that wretched seeker of love adventures, that idler of romance,
that idiot, that coward, for it is cowardly to come and make eyes at
young girls who have beside them a father who loves them.
After he had thoroughly verified the fact that this young man
was at the bottom of this situation, and that everything proceeded
from that quarter, he, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man
who had so labored over his soul, the man who had made so many efforts
to resolve all life, all misery, and all unhappiness into love,
looked into his own breast and there beheld a spectre, Hate.
Great griefs contain something of dejection. They discourage one
with existence. The man into whom they enter feels something within
him withdraw from him. In his youth, their visits are lugubrious;
later on they are sinister. Alas, if despair is a fearful thing
when the blood is hot, when the hair is black, when the head is erect
on the body like the flame on the torch, when the roll of destiny still
retains its full thickness, when the heart, full of desirable love,
still possesses beats which can be returned to it, when one has time
for redress, when all women and all smiles and all the future and
all the horizon are before one, when the force of life is complete,
what is it in old age, when the years hasten on, growing ever paler,
to that twilight hour when one begins to behold the stars of the tomb?
While he was meditating, Toussaint entered. Jean Valjean rose
and asked her:--
"In what quarter is it? Do you know?"
Toussaint was struck dumb, and could only answer him:--
"What is it, sir?"
Jean Valjean began again: "Did you not tell me that just now
that there is fighting going on?"
"Ah! yes, sir," replied Toussaint. "It is in the direction
of Saint-Merry."
There is a mechanical movement which comes to us, unconsciously,
from the most profound depths of our thought. It was, no doubt,
under the impulse of a movement of this sort, and of which he
was hardly conscious, that Jean Valjean, five minutes later,
found himself in the street.
Bareheaded, he sat upon the stone post at the door of his house.
He seemed to be listening.
Night had come. _
Read next: VOLUME IV: BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME: CHAPTER II. The Street Urchin an Enemy of Light
Read previous: VOLUME IV: BOOK FOURTEENTH - THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR: CHAPTER VII. Gavroche as a Profound Calculator of Distances
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