Chương Chương 21 · JEAN VALJEAN

Towards the middle of the night Jean Valjean woke.

Jean Valjean came from a poor peasant family of Brie. He had not

learned to read in his childhood. When he reached man’s estate, he

became a tree-pruner at Faverolles. His mother was named Jeanne

Mathieu; his father was called Jean Valjean or Vlajean, probably a

sobriquet, and a contraction of _voilà_ Jean, “here’s Jean.”

Jean Valjean was of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition which

constitutes the peculiarity of affectionate natures. On the whole,

however, there was something decidedly sluggish and insignificant about

Jean Valjean in appearance, at least. He had lost his father and mother

at a very early age. His mother had died of a milk fever, which had not

been properly attended to. His father, a tree-pruner, like himself, had

been killed by a fall from a tree. All that remained to Jean Valjean

was a sister older than himself,—a widow with seven children, boys and

girls. This sister had brought up Jean Valjean, and so long as she had

a husband she lodged and fed her young brother.

The husband died. The eldest of the seven children was eight years old.

The youngest, one.

Jean Valjean had just attained his twenty-fifth year. He took the

father’s place, and, in his turn, supported the sister who had brought

him up. This was done simply as a duty and even a little churlishly on

the part of Jean Valjean. Thus his youth had been spent in rude and

ill-paid toil. He had never known a “kind woman friend” in his native

parts. He had not had the time to fall in love.

He returned at night weary, and ate his broth without uttering a word.

His sister, mother Jeanne, often took the best part of his repast from

his bowl while he was eating,—a bit of meat, a slice of bacon, the

heart of the cabbage,—to give to one of her children. As he went on

eating, with his head bent over the table and almost into his soup, his

long hair falling about his bowl and concealing his eyes, he had the

air of perceiving nothing and allowing it. There was at Faverolles, not

far from the Valjean thatched cottage, on the other side of the lane, a

farmer’s wife named Marie-Claude; the Valjean children, habitually

famished, sometimes went to borrow from Marie-Claude a pint of milk, in

their mother’s name, which they drank behind a hedge or in some alley

corner, snatching the jug from each other so hastily that the little

girls spilled it on their aprons and down their necks. If their mother

had known of this marauding, she would have punished the delinquents

severely. Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid Marie-Claude for

the pint of milk behind their mother’s back, and the children were not

punished.

In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out as a

hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge. He did

whatever he could. His sister worked also but what could she do with

seven little children? It was a sad group enveloped in misery, which

was being gradually annihilated. A very hard winter came. Jean had no

work. The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven children!

One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Church Square at

Faverolles, was preparing to go to bed, when he heard a violent blow on

the grated front of his shop. He arrived in time to see an arm passed

through a hole made by a blow from a fist, through the grating and the

glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off. Isabeau ran

out in haste; the robber fled at the full speed of his legs. Isabeau

ran after him and stopped him. The thief had flung away the loaf, but

his arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.

This took place in 1795. Jean Valjean was taken before the tribunals of

the time for theft and breaking and entering an inhabited house at

night. He had a gun which he used better than any one else in the

world, he was a bit of a poacher, and this injured his case. There

exists a legitimate prejudice against poachers. The poacher, like the

smuggler, smacks too strongly of the brigand. Nevertheless, we will

remark cursorily, there is still an abyss between these races of men

and the hideous assassin of the towns. The poacher lives in the forest,

the smuggler lives in the mountains or on the sea. The cities make

ferocious men because they make corrupt men. The mountain, the sea, the

forest, make savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often

without destroying the humane side.

Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty. The terms of the Code were

explicit. There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are

moments when the penal laws decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute

is that in which society draws back and consummates the irreparable

abandonment of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five

years in the galleys.

On the 22d of April, 1796, the victory of Montenotte, won by the

general-in-chief of the army of Italy, whom the message of the

Directory to the Five Hundred, of the 2d of Floréal, year IV., calls

Buona-Parte, was announced in Paris; on that same day a great gang of

galley-slaves was put in chains at Bicêtre. Jean Valjean formed a part

of that gang. An old turnkey of the prison, who is now nearly eighty

years old, still recalls perfectly that unfortunate wretch who was

chained to the end of the fourth line, in the north angle of the

courtyard. He was seated on the ground like the others. He did not seem

to comprehend his position, except that it was horrible. It is probable

that he, also, was disentangling from amid the vague ideas of a poor

man, ignorant of everything, something excessive. While the bolt of his

iron collar was being riveted behind his head with heavy blows from the

hammer, he wept, his tears stifled him, they impeded his speech; he

only managed to say from time to time, “I was a tree-pruner at

Faverolles.” Then still sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered

it gradually seven times, as though he were touching in succession

seven heads of unequal heights, and from this gesture it was divined

that the thing which he had done, whatever it was, he had done for the

sake of clothing and nourishing seven little children.

He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of

twenty-seven days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he

was clothed in the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even

to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was

number 24,601. What became of his sister? What became of the seven

children? Who troubled himself about that? What becomes of the handful

of leaves from the young tree which is sawed off at the root?

It is always the same story. These poor living beings, these creatures

of God, henceforth without support, without guide, without refuge,

wandered away at random,—who even knows?—each in his own direction

perhaps, and little by little buried themselves in that cold mist which

engulfs solitary destinies; gloomy shades, into which disappear in

succession so many unlucky heads, in the sombre march of the human

race. They quitted the country. The clock-tower of what had been their

village forgot them; the boundary line of what had been their field

forgot them; after a few years’ residence in the galleys, Jean Valjean

himself forgot them. In that heart, where there had been a wound, there

was a scar. That is all. Only once, during all the time which he spent

at Toulon, did he hear his sister mentioned. This happened, I think,

towards the end of the fourth year of his captivity. I know not through

what channels the news reached him. Some one who had known them in

their own country had seen his sister. She was in Paris. She lived in a

poor street near Saint-Sulpice, in the Rue du Gindre. She had with her

only one child, a little boy, the youngest. Where were the other six?

Perhaps she did not know herself. Every morning she went to a printing

office, No. 3 Rue du Sabot, where she was a folder and stitcher. She

was obliged to be there at six o’clock in the morning—long before

daylight in winter. In the same building with the printing office there

was a school, and to this school she took her little boy, who was seven

years old. But as she entered the printing office at six, and the

school only opened at seven, the child had to wait in the courtyard,

for the school to open, for an hour—one hour of a winter night in the

open air! They would not allow the child to come into the printing

office, because he was in the way, they said. When the workmen passed

in the morning, they beheld this poor little being seated on the

pavement, overcome with drowsiness, and often fast asleep in the

shadow, crouched down and doubled up over his basket. When it rained,

an old woman, the portress, took pity on him; she took him into her

den, where there was a pallet, a spinning-wheel, and two wooden chairs,

and the little one slumbered in a corner, pressing himself close to the

cat that he might suffer less from cold. At seven o’clock the school

opened, and he entered. That is what was told to Jean Valjean.

They talked to him about it for one day; it was a moment, a flash, as

though a window had suddenly been opened upon the destiny of those

things whom he had loved; then all closed again. He heard nothing more

forever. Nothing from them ever reached him again; he never beheld

them; he never met them again; and in the continuation of this mournful

history they will not be met with any more.

Towards the end of this fourth year Jean Valjean’s turn to escape

arrived. His comrades assisted him, as is the custom in that sad place.

He escaped. He wandered for two days in the fields at liberty, if being

at liberty is to be hunted, to turn the head every instant, to quake at

the slightest noise, to be afraid of everything,—of a smoking roof, of

a passing man, of a barking dog, of a galloping horse, of a striking

clock, of the day because one can see, of the night because one cannot

see, of the highway, of the path, of a bush, of sleep. On the evening

of the second day he was captured. He had neither eaten nor slept for

thirty-six hours. The maritime tribunal condemned him, for this crime,

to a prolongation of his term for three years, which made eight years.

In the sixth year his turn to escape occurred again; he availed himself

of it, but could not accomplish his flight fully. He was missing at

roll-call. The cannon were fired, and at night the patrol found him

hidden under the keel of a vessel in process of construction; he

resisted the galley guards who seized him. Escape and rebellion. This

case, provided for by a special code, was punished by an addition of

five years, two of them in the double chain. Thirteen years. In the

tenth year his turn came round again; he again profited by it; he

succeeded no better. Three years for this fresh attempt. Sixteen years.

Finally, I think it was during his thirteenth year, he made a last

attempt, and only succeeded in getting retaken at the end of four hours

of absence. Three years for those four hours. Nineteen years. In

October, 1815, he was released; he had entered there in 1796, for

having broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread.

Room for a brief parenthesis. This is the second time, during his

studies on the penal question and damnation by law, that the author of

this book has come across the theft of a loaf of bread as the point of

departure for the disaster of a destiny. Claude Gaux had stolen a loaf;

Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf. English statistics prove the fact that

four thefts out of five in London have hunger for their immediate

cause.

Jean Valjean had entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering; he emerged

impassive. He had entered in despair; he emerged gloomy.

What had taken place in that soul?