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CHAPTER VII
THE INTERIOR OF DESPAIR
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.
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