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JEAN VALJEAN
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?
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