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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.
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