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THE CHAIN-GANG
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?"
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