บทที่ บทที่ 64 · 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 Bénigne 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

Théramène, 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.