Chapter Chapter 296 · A DRINKER IS A BABBLER

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 Armé. 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 Armé 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 Armé after night had

fully fallen.

They had gone to bed in silence.

The lodgings in the Rue de l’Homme Armé 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

Armé 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 midday, 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 armchair, 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 reverie.

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 Armé, 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

armchair 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 reverie, 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.